EAGER: BIOMAPS: Understanding Microbiological Intricacies and Developing Modeling Strategies to Estimate Nitrous Oxide Emissions from Urban Engineered Green Infrastructures

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

1514637 Goel EAGER: Understanding Microbiological Intricacies and Developing Modeling Strategies to Estimate Nitrous Oxide Emissions from Urban Engineered Green Infrastructures The National Academy of Engineering published a report entitled "NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering." One of the 14 challenges was to "manage the nitrogen cycle." The importance of this project is to develop a better understanding of the nitrogen cycle in storm water retention ponds. This will enable scientists studying the nitrogen cycle to better account for this potentially important source of nitrogen. Bioretention ponds have evolved as an excellent option in the form of green infrastructure to manage nutrients in storm water runoffs. Very recent research efforts have evaluated the contribution of biological processes, such as nitrification and denitrification, on the fate of nitrogen in bioretention ponds. However, the information on the kinetics of these biological processes and most importantly, the information on the potential of nitrous oxide gas, N2O, formation from these green infrastructures are completely missing. This project aims to get the first information on the potential of nitrous oxide fluxes from prototype bioretention field scale facilities located at the University of Utah Campus. The results will be utilized to formulate conceptual model to predict these fluxes at a regional scale. The research objectives proposed in this project are exploratory as well as high risk as biological N removal in bioretention ponds is not well understood and little information is available on nitrous oxide emissions from these urban green infrastructures. This project is expected to lead to a new area of research linking microbiological processes in green infrastructure to urban site scale hydrologic processes, with eventual upscaling to the watershed level.