The Urban Soil Conundrum: Compaction vs Water Quality and Quantity Treatment

Urban soils are the workhorses of stormwater management and also of our infrastructure. They are expected to provide structural support to our buildings and roads, yet be porous enough to infiltrate all stormwater during water quality storm events. They are expected to grow vegetation quickly but not leach nutrients. They are expected to continue to infiltrate stormwater and retain captured pollutants for years, yet they are attacked every winter by road salts. The demands on urban soils are often conflicting, requiring the site designer to think about multiple objectives when calculating stormwater runoff volume, rate, and pollutant capture efficiency.

Urban soils, especially in areas that are older and developed, also are poorly understood. Development practices have ranged from non-mechanized to mechanized and landforms changed with poor documentation, leaving the developed urban landscape often as a mystery. This webinar will discuss these tradeoffs between water quality, water quantity, and urban development practices. It will address the current limitations of both water quality and quantity testing and modeling in urban areas and how these limitations can be overcome, especially in light of climate change and the anticipated increase in high energy, short duration storms which may overwhelm our current stormwater management practices.