From the Editor’s Desk

This issue of the Bulletin focuses on the use of green infrastructure in urban watersheds and how its implementation has gone beyond water quality improvements to enhance community involvement and provide greater ecological function to our urban areas. For the purposes of this issue, we define green infrastructure broadly to include landscape-scale natural features and site-scale practices, such that we may consider the full range of its applications. For example, green infrastructure in the field of conservation planning refers to the network of natural lands across the landscape, such as forests, wetlands, stream corridors, and grasslands, while its applications in engineering include practices ranging from impervious cover reduction to stormwater best management practices, such as bioretention.

Green infrastructure strives not only to improve water quality and aquatic ecosystems, but also to positively affect social and economic aspects within communities. To this end, innovation in design, from community planning to stormwater management, is key to solving many issues facing urban areas today. Green infrastructure in its many forms is part of the solution, and contributors to this issue provide examples of the type of innovation that is happening in watersheds throughout the United States at a regional or watershed scale.

In This Issue

Mayer and others provide a detailed analysis of a stream restoration project in Baltimore County, Maryland, to identify factors that limit the removal of excess nitrogen in degraded urban streams. The case study demonstrates how monitoring before and after a restoration is central to the identification of the nutrient contributions from instream processes and restoration and management actions to enhance nitrogen removal.

Moving from the reach scale to the watershed scale, Wood and others compare two modeling approaches to select the most cost-effective best management practices in a subwatershed of the Charles River. The regulatory driver behind the project required a process that was technically and scientifically sound and had buy-in from the local jurisdiction. The lessons learned from their experience are likely to be applicable to urban watersheds elsewhere that strive to find a balance between pollutant load reductions and cost.

In the Vignettes section, a series of case studies highlight the role of green infrastructure in the redevelopment of brownfields and its multiple benefits beyond stormwater pollutant load reduction. Gray and Green Approaches To Address Combined Sewer Overflows in Northeast Ohio highlights Project Clean Lake, through which the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District adopted a “triple-bottom-line” approach to reduce stormwater loadings to its combined sewer system. Brownfields and vacant properties in areas targeted for urban revitalization are priority sites for green infrastructure. The Green Renewal of Milwaukee’s Menomonee Valley describes a community-based effort, whereby local input on the area’s vision and goals resulted in a design to redevelop a blighted industrial district using green infrastructure that include stormwater management and local amenities, such as a trail system. A green infrastructure approach is used to green an urban corridor to restore the ecological function and resilience that connects two water resources—the Mississippi River and Bayou Bienvenue in New Orleans, as described in Groundwork New Orleans: Developing a Green Slice Watershed Habitat Corridor. The vignette, The Role of Stream Restoration in Green Infrastructure, describes an urban stream restoration as an example of how an urban, channelized stream can be transformed into a meandering channel, providing water quality improvements and other ecosystem services.

In the Ask the Experts section, we ask practitioners and researchers how their communities are using green infrastructure to address combined sewer overflows.

With this issue, we aim to help inform watershed and stormwater practitioners about how green infrastructure, in its many forms, can fit into their programs to protect and restore watersheds.

Neely L. Law, PhD, Editor-in-Chief