CAREER: Integrated Assessments of the Impacts of Decentralized Land Use and Water Management Practices in Urban Ecosystems

Drexel University, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

1150994(Montalto) This project will advance knowledge about poorly understood hydrologic processes that occur on vegetated and impervious land parcels in dense urban environments, and their relationship to ecosystem services. Special attention is paid to the watershed-scale implications of deliberate micro-scale redirections of water in ultra-urban settings, e.g. green infrastructure (GI) projects. The research makes use of existing sensors in GI monitoring sites that the PI has assembled with other resources, but which are not currently integrated into a network. A new relational database will link this collection of sites and sensors and support complex and highly specific data retrieval queries, with significantly more sites and sensors to be made available by project collaborators. The results of these queries will advance knowledge about the hydrologic outcomes that can be expected from different GI treatments implemented in different contexts. The database will enable efficient longitudinal (e.g. between sites), and/or vertical (e.g. between sensors) discoveries regarding the hydrologic performance of GI. Without this database, such queries would be nearly impossible to perform efficiently. Because the GI systems included in the database receive runoff from different sized source areas, the database will also facilitate potentially transformative investigations into the effects of scale on urban hydrology. Agent models will provide simulation platforms within which to explore the relative importance of different hydrologic, climatological, and social uncertainties in predicting emergent watershed-scale ecosystem services, in different urban neighborhoods. With "hydrologic response rules" derived directly from data stored in the relational database, the models will enhance ability to accurately depict urban scale hydrologic fluxes under different innovative management regimes. Community members will be actively involved in the agent-model building process. The research will yield findings relevant to technical practitioners (engineers, urban designers, water utility representatives), natural scientists (ecologists, hydrologists, biologists,) as well as to planners (community groups, municipal sustainability directors), and a range of interdisciplinary academic researchers. The research is structured to provide opportunities for the participation of a diverse set of undergraduate and graduate students, community members, and government and non-profit partners. The Citizen Science program, recruiting at least 50% from demographic groups traditionally underrepresented in science, will engage residents of five study neighborhoods in data collection activities, and is intended to become a model for two-way learning between university researchers and the urban community. A Sustainable Water Resource Engineering (SWRE) Field Training (FT) Program will provide a forum for encouraging the participation of undergraduate students in research. The FT projects will be used to create a database of innovative water projects and SWRE teaching modules which will be available to the public on the PI?s institutional website. New urban ecohydrologic data sets will be streamed in real-time to a Drexel server that will be linked to the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information Service through web-services. This new infrastructure will make the data assembled and organized as part of this project accessible to the larger hydrologic research community. Semi-annual meetings with a Scientific Advisory Committee will ensure dissemination of the research findings. Collaborations have also been forged with a) the USEPA-NRML offices in Edison, NJ, taking advantage of a recently signed MOU between EPA and NSF, and b) the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, one of one of two urban nodes in NSF?s Long-Term Ecological Research network. Through the project, the PI will also continue collaborating with researchers from Columbia University, with whom he is already working as part of the NOAA-funded Consortium on Climate Risks in the Urban Northeast.