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A combined field-modeling study on urban soil hydrology and implications for passive green infrastructure
Citation:
Schifman, L., D. Herrmann, AND W. Shuster. A combined field-modeling study on urban soil hydrology and implications for passive green infrastructure. EWRI 2018, Minneapolis, MN, June 03 - 08, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Green infrastructure (GI) represents a broad set of stormwater control measures practices that can be flexibly implemented to increase sewershed retention capacity, and can thereby improve on the management of water quantity and quality. Although much GI presents as formal engineered designs, urbanized landscapes with highly-interspersed pervious surfaces (e.g., right-of-way, parks, lawns, vacant land) may offer ecosystem services as passive, infiltrative GI.
Description:
Green infrastructure (GI) represents a broad set of stormwater control measures practices that can be flexibly implemented to increase sewershed retention capacity, and can thereby improve on the management of water quantity and quality. Although much GI presents as formal engineered designs, urbanized landscapes with highly-interspersed pervious surfaces (e.g., right-of-way, parks, lawns, vacant land) may offer ecosystem services as passive, infiltrative GI. In all cases of GI, infiltration and drainage processes are regulated by soil surface conditions and then the heterogeneous layering of subsoil horizons. Drawing on a unique urban soil taxonomic and hydrologic dataset collected in 12 cities (each city representing a major soil order), we were able to gain an understanding of the suitability of commonly-used prediction algorithms (e.g., USDA ROSETTA, USEPA National Stormwater Calculator) for predicting urban soil hydrology. We found that for the majority of sites evaluated, neither pedotransfer functions nor national soils datasets referenced in the Stormwater Calculator accurately represent urban hydrologic conditions. We next related actual soil horizon sequences with corresponding hydrologic data (compared to pre-urbanized reference soil pedons) to model the overall hydrologic impacts of urbanization (HYDRUS1D). We found that the different layering sequences in urbanized soils generate different types and extents of supporting (plant-available soil water), provisioning (productive vegetation), and regulating (runoff mitigation) ecosystem services. These results contribute to defining passive green infrastructure, and the extent to which it may feasibly and economically contribute, for example, to rendering ecosystem services and achieving compliance with Clean Water Act enforcement actions