Pressures on urban, peri-urban and rural water and agricultural systems are increasingly complex with multiple interacting stresses and impacts. As a way of addressing these issues there has been increasing consideration as to how to build and manage resilience in these complex social-ecological systems. This paper presents a case study of the role of water recycling for agricultural use within...

Stormwater biofilters (also called rain gardens, bioretention systems, and bioswales) are used to manage stormwater runoff in urbanized environments. Some benefits of biofilters include flood prevention, stormwater runoff water quality improvement, and wildlife habitat. This technology has been implemented on a larger scale in southeast Australia, but cities and counties in southern California ...

The practice of urban drainage has been traced back to some of the earliest recorded histories of humankind. The expeditious conveyance of stormwater from urbanized areas was motivated primarily by reasons of convenience and the reduction of ̄ood damage potential. The removal of domestic wastes from households using waterborne conveyances was also found to be convenient. Such practices to improv...

Cities are expanding green infrastructure to enhance resilience and ecosystem services. Although green infrastructure is promoted for its multifunctionality, projects are typically sited based on a particular benefit, such as stormwater abatement, rather than a suite of socio-economic and environmental benefits. This stems in part from the lack of stakeholder-informed, city-scale approaches to ...

There is the need to re-configure current urban water systems to achieve the objective of sustainable water sensitive cities. Stormwater represents a valuable alternative urban water source to reduce pressure on fresh water resources, and to mitigate the environmental impact of urban stormwater runoff. The selection of suitable urban stormwater harvesting sites is generally based on the judgeme...

Urban expansion replaces wetlands of natural origin with artificial stormwater management facilities. The literature suggests that efforts to mimic natural wetlands in the design of stormwater facilities can expand the provision of ecosystem services. Policy developments seek to capitalize on these improvements, encouraging developers to build stormwater wetlands in place of stormwater ponds; h...

Stormwater management for water quality control is a relatively recent technology. Initially urban stormwater was considered a water quantity problem solved by rapidly draining runoff into sewers, ditches or directly into lakes and rivers. By the mid-1970s studies showed over half the pollutant loads entering Florida waters came from non-point sources (stormwater) caused in part by paving, ditc...

Particulate phosphorus (PP) is often the largest component of the total phosphorus (P) load in stormwater. Fine-resolution measurement of particle sizes allows us to investigate the mechanisms behind the removal of PP in stormwater wetlands, since the diameter of particles influences the settling velocity and the amount of sorbed P on a particle. In this paper, we present a novel method to esti...

Nowadays, the increasing use of vehicles is causing contaminated stormwater runoff to drain from roads. The detailed understanding of urban wash-off processes is essential for addressing urban management issues. However, existing modelling approaches are rarely applied for these objectives due to the lack of realistic input data, unsuitability of physical descriptions, and inadequate documentat...

Managing excess nutrients remains a major obstacle to improving ecosystem service benefits of urban waters. To inform more ecologically based landscape nutrient management, we compared watershed inputs, outputs, and retention for nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in seven subwatersheds of the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota. Lawn fertilizer and pet waste dominated N and P inputs, respect...