Stormwater Planning
Stormwater Planning is an important strategy for green urban development. Precipitation coming into contact with contaminants that result from human development (for example, road salt) can be hazardous to the surrounding environments during run-off. Several studies in the 1990s led to new insights into the causal relationship between changes in hydrology brought about by urban development and the potential biological impacts upon various ecosystems.
In assessing the achievability the future of watershed retrofits, the focus is on what is feasible and affordable over time. New objectives call for an integrated strategy at the site level, founded in a design with nature’ approach to rainfall capture and runoff control. This strategy optimizes the use of soil, plants and trees, and surface treatments to capture rain where it falls. Recognizing that there is a practical limit to what can be achieved at the site scale once land clearing has altered the water balance, the integrated strategy for managing the complete rainfall spectrum has three tiered or cascading components. These correspond to three scales site, neighborhood and watershed to achieve two goals:
Protect aquatic habitat through site and neighborhood solutions that keep rain on site and delay runoff, respectively.
Protect life and property through watershed-scale solutions that reduce flooding.
When landscape-based solutions are implemented at the site level, success is evident at the neighborhood and watershed scales.
