Impacts of green infrastructure implementation within the Neuse River Basin
Abstract
American Rivers is advocating for implementation of Green Infrastructure (GI) as a
stormwater management strategy within the City of Raleigh. Incorporation of GI into
future development plans is an appealing option for growing urban centers to minimize
their impact upon surrounding aquatic ecosystems. Since Raleigh lies outside the regulatory
boundary of the Falls Lake Nutrient Strategy, there is not a significant driver in
place to encourage a shift towards GI. This study provided American Rivers with estimates
of potential scale of GI retrofit implementation within a highly developed stormwater
drainage basin, as well as the benefits those retrofits would provide in terms of
nutrient load and peak flow reductions from stormwater flow. This was accomplished
through the development of a GIS tool that identifies potential GI retrofit locations
within Raleigh stormwater drainage basins, expediting the retrofit field reconnaissance
process. The outputs of this tool were then incorporated into PLOAD, a GIS-based pollutant
load modeling application for watershed-scale management, which provided estimates
of mass loading rates of TN, TP, and TSS. The study area consisted of 11 subcatchments
within Pigeon House Branch stormwater drainage basin (3200 acres, ~32% mean impervious
coverage). Estimated annual pollutant load reductions resulting from GI implementation
were 0.67, 9.92, and 16.82 tons of TP, TN, and TSS, respectively, although the accuracy
of these numbers is questionable due to the coarse scale at which PLOAD operates.
Ideally, other modeling efforts can be applied within this study’s framework to produce
more informed scenarios within other drainage basins throughout the Neuse River Basin.
Type
Master's projectPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9672Citation
Green, Benjamin (2015). Impacts of green infrastructure implementation within the Neuse River Basin. Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9672.Collections
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