Green infrastructure stormwater management at the watershed scale: urban variable source area and watershed capacitance

Miles, Brian; Band, Lawrence E.

doi:10.1002/hyp.10448

Cited by 67 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…RHESSys couples elements of the ecosystem models BIOME‐BGC (Running & Hunt, ) and CENTURY (Parton, Schimel, Cole, & Ojima, ), with distributed watershed models to derive the coupling between ecosystem water use, carbon and nitrogen cycling with lateral soil water redistribution. RHESSys has been widely used to estimate spatially distributed soil moisture, ET, surface and subsurface run‐off, carbon and nitrogen cycling in different biomes and under different climate and land use change scenarios (e.g., Band, Patterson, Nemani, & Running, ; Bart, Tague, & Moritz, ; Garcia, Tague, & Choate, ; Hanan, Tague, & Schimel, ; Hwang et al, ; Lin, ; Lin, Webster, Hwang, & Band, ; Miles & Band, ; Tague & Band, ). RHESSys uses a landscape hierarchical structure over nested patch (Figure ), hillslope and watershed scales (Figure ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecosystem processes at the watershed scale: Influence of flowpath patterns of canopy ecophysiology on emergent catchment water and carbon cycling

et al. 2019

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Forest canopy water use and carbon cycling traits (WCT) can vary substantially and in spatially organized patterns, with significant impacts on watershed ecohydrology. In many watersheds, WCT may vary systematically along and between hydrologic flowpaths as an adaptation to available soil water, nutrients, and microclimate‐mediated atmospheric water demand. We hypothesize that the emerging patterns of WCT at the hillslope to catchment scale provide a more resistant ecohydrological system, particularly with respect to drought stress, and the maintenance of high levels of productivity. Rather than attempting to address this hypothesis with species‐specific patterns, we outline broader functional WCT groups and explore the sensitivity of water and carbon balances to the representation of canopy WCT functional organization through a modelling approach. We use a well‐studied experimental watershed in North Carolina where detailed mapping of forest community patterns are sufficient to describe WCT functional organization. Ecohydrological models typically use broad‐scale characterizations of forest canopy composition based on remotely sensed information (e.g., evergreen vs. deciduous), which may not adequately represent the range or spatial pattern of functional group WCT at hillslope to watershed scales. We use three different representations of WCT functional organizations: (1) restricting WCT to deciduous/conifer differentiation, (2) utilizing more detailed, but aspatial, information on local forest community composition, and (3) spatially distributed representation of local forest WCT. Accounting for WCT functional organization information improves model performance not only in terms of capturing observed flow regimes (especially watershed‐scale seasonal flow dynamics) but also in terms of representing more detailed canopy ecohydrologic behaviour (e.g., root zone soil moisture, evapotranspiration, and net canopy photosynthesis), especially under dry condition. Results suggest that the well‐known zonation of forest communities over hydrologic gradients is not just a local adaptation but also provides a property that regulates hillslope to catchment‐scale behaviour of water use and drought resistance.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecosystem processes at the watershed scale: Influence of flowpath patterns of canopy ecophysiology on emergent catchment water and carbon cycling

et al. 2019

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“…A goal of LID is to promote catchment and stormwater resilience, restore predevelopment flow regimes, and increase watershed, or catchment, capacitance. Catchment capacitance is the extent to which rainwater, snowmelt, and runoff onto and in transport from impervious surfaces to previous areas can be infiltrated, stored, and released as catchment baseflow or evapotranspiration . The idea arises from the urban variable source area (UVSA) concept, a specialized form of variable source area hydrology, which describes locations in a catchment that rapidly saturate and produce runoff following precipitation or snowmelt events.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Green infrastructure and its catchment‐scale effects: an emerging science

2017

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Urbanizing environments alter the hydrological cycle by redirecting stream networks for stormwater and wastewater transmission and increasing impermeable surfaces. These changes thereby accelerate the runoff of water and its constituents following precipitation events, alter evapotranspiration processes, and indirectly modify surface precipitation patterns. Green infrastructure, or low-impact development (LID), can be used as a standalone practice or in concert with gray infrastructure (traditional stormwater management approaches) for cost-efficient, decentralized stormwater management. The growth in LID over the past several decades has resulted in a concomitant increase in research evaluating LID efficiency and effectiveness, but mostly at localized scales. There is a clear research need to quantify how LID practices affect water quantity (i.e., runoff and discharge) and quality at the scale of catchments. In this overview, we present the state of the science of LID research at the local scale, considerations for scaling this research to catchments, recent advances and findings in scaling the effects of LID practices on water quality and quantity at catchment scales, and the use of models as novel tools for these scaling efforts.

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“…LID, also called sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDSs), among other globally varying names [5], is an approach that uses soils, vegetation, and landscape design to control nonpoint source runoff and pollutants in urban systems. A goal of LID is to promote watershed resilience through "green" design [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cumulative Effects of Low Impact Development on Watershed Hydrology in a Mixed Land-Cover System

Hoghooghi

Golden

Bledsoe

et al. 2018

Water

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Low Impact Development (LID) is an alternative to conventional urban stormwater management practices, which aims at mitigating the impacts of urbanization on water quantity and quality. Plot and local scale studies provide evidence of LID effectiveness; however, little is known about the overall watershed scale influence of LID practices. This is particularly true in watersheds with a land cover that is more diverse than that of urban or suburban classifications alone. We address this watershed-scale gap by assessing the effects of three common LID practices (rain gardens, permeable pavement, and riparian buffers) on the hydrology of a 0.94 km 2 mixed land cover watershed. We used a spatially-explicit ecohydrological model, called Visualizing Ecosystems for Land Management Assessments (VELMA), to compare changes in watershed hydrologic responses before and after the implementation of LID practices. For the LID scenarios, we examined different spatial configurations, using 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% implementation extents, to convert sidewalks into rain gardens, and parking lots and driveways into permeable pavement. We further applied 20 m and 40 m riparian buffers along streams that were adjacent to agricultural land cover. The results showed overall increases in shallow subsurface runoff and infiltration, as well as evapotranspiration, and decreases in peak flows and surface runoff across all types and configurations of LID. Among individual LID practices, rain gardens had the greatest influence on each component of the overall watershed water balance. As anticipated, the combination of LID practices at the highest implementation level resulted in the most substantial changes to the overall watershed hydrology. It is notable that all hydrological changes from the LID implementation, ranging from 0.01 to 0.06 km 2 across the study watershed, were modest, which suggests a potentially limited efficacy of LID practices in mixed land cover watersheds.

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Green infrastructure stormwater management at the watershed scale: urban variable source area and watershed capacitance

Cited by 67 publications

References 35 publications

Ecosystem processes at the watershed scale: Influence of flowpath patterns of canopy ecophysiology on emergent catchment water and carbon cycling

Ecosystem processes at the watershed scale: Influence of flowpath patterns of canopy ecophysiology on emergent catchment water and carbon cycling

Green infrastructure and its catchment‐scale effects: an emerging science

Cumulative Effects of Low Impact Development on Watershed Hydrology in a Mixed Land-Cover System

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