ABSTRACT:

Flood infrastructure that uses pipes and culverts, also called gray infrastructure, collects and conveys stormwater to receiving areas, typically oceans, inland lakes, and wetlands. Gray infrastructure increases stormwater runoff volume and exposure to pollutants and prevents infiltration to groundwater. Green infrastructure is increasingly proposed to reestablish ecosystem services that are lost from urban development. This study uses QUAL2Kw to simulate streamflow, stream temperature, dissolved oxygen concentration, and total phosphorus concentration in the Jordan River Watershed in Salt Lake City, UT, USA with and without implementation of grass swales, bioretention cells, and rain gardens at the reach, small watershed, and large watershed scales. Sixty-four model runs simulated streamflow and water quality effects if 10%, 50%, and 100% of the available watershed area converted to green infrastructure. As an example, the 100% implementation of rain gardens for roofs alternative reduced streamflow by 5.6% and 4.6% in the May and June models, respectively. Secondly, the 100% implementation of bioretention cells for parking lots alternative leads to a decrease of 5.8% in total phosphorus load to adjacent surface water bodies. Overall, it takes implementation of green infrastructure on the large watershed scale to see measurable changes downstream. When green infrastructure is implemented on the large watershed scale, total phosphorus concentrations are reduced by 3-6% in reaches that total phosphorus is a pollutant of concern. These findings quantify the potential of green infrastructure to maintain ecosystem services such as water quality improvement, flood mitigation, and water supply.

ABSTRACT:

Project Abstract:
Widespread development and shifts from rural to urban areas within the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) has increased fire risks to local populations, as well as introduced complex and long-term costs and benefits to communities. We use an interdisciplinary approach to investigate how trends in fire characteristics influence adaptive management and economies in the Intermountain Western US (IMW). Specifically, we analyze area burned and fire frequency in the IMW over time, how fires in urban or rural settings influence local economies and whether fire trends and economic impacts influence managers’ perspectives and adaptive decision-making. Our analyses showed some increasing fire trends at multiple levels. Using a non-parametric event study model, we evaluated the effects of fire events in rural and urban areas on county-level private industry employment, finding short- and long-term positive effects of fire on employment at several scales and some short-term negative effects for specific sectors. Through interviewing 20 fire managers, we found that most recognize increasing fire trends and that there are both positive and negative economic effects of fire. We also established that many of the participants are implementing adaptive fire management strategies and we identified key challenges to mitigating increasing fire risk in the IMW. The data and code for the fire and economic analyses, as well as our interview protocol, are provided in this HydroShare repository. Further details and metadata are outlined in the "Extended_Metadata.pdf" file.