Announcing STORMS

I’m pleased to announce that I’m leading a new multi-institution NSF-funded project investigating how stormwater decision making translates to environmental outcomes at the watershed scale. I’m collaborating with Aditi Bhaskar (Colorado State University), Kelly Turner (UCLA), and Dave Costello (Kent State University) on the project we’ve christened STORMS, for STream Outcomes Resulting from Management of Stormwater.

Over the next three years, we’ll be working in set of watersheds and municipalities in the Cleveland and Denver regions. Cleveland and Denver have different climates, hydrology, and institutional structures affecting stormwater management, and our goal is to distill generalized knowledge from studying these contrasting regions.

We’ll be collecting social, physical, and ecological datasets to generate an integrated understanding of stormwater management decision making and environmental consequences. We’ll start by looking at how formal institutional rules and informal norms shape the decisions made at the local and regional scale and translate to specific management actions (like building ponds versus rain gardens). The next step is to see how those management actions affect urban watersheds’ hydrologic regime, and we’ll do that by using stakeholder-informed modeling, as well as retrospective analysis of hydrology and stormwater actions. We’ll use stream metabolism and suspended sediment transport as our measures of environmental outcomes, so there will be field work in six watersheds to draw the connections between hydrologic and sediment dynamics and ecosystem health. By the end of the project, we’ll tie all of our findings together using a Bayesian network.

Throughout the project, we’ll be working with stakeholders, including watershed groups and decision-making authorities, to both shape our approach and share results. We’ll also be working with Cleveland Metroparks and Denver KIC-NET educators to develop Data Nuggets, that they can use with middle school and high school students. Collaborator Lauren Kinsman-Costello helped develop Data Nuggets, which give students practice making claims based on quantitative evidence. We’ll draw from the data collected over the course of the project and connect the nuggets to Next Generation Science Standards relevant to the engineering and environmental science within the project.

I’ll be seeking a PhD student to work on the hydrological aspects of the project, and Dave Costello will be recruiting a MS student to lead the ecosystem metabolism piece of the project. Look for those ads in the coming weeks and months. We’ll also be recruiting undergraduate researchers from Kent State University and Colorado State University.