Proposing a framework for crowd-sourced green infrastructure design

Green stormwater infrastructure (GI) (e.g., rain gardens, bioswales, green roofs, etc.) are decentralized systems that have gained recent attention for their ability to reduce stormwater management problems while significantly benefiting human and ecosystem well-being. Available GI design methodologies lack a participatory framework that considers community-specific social, cultural, economic, and political constraints, critical components for widespread acceptance and effective implementation and maintenance of such systems. A project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation seeks to develop a novel, computational, GI design framework that integrates interactive, neighborhood-scale, collaborative design by multiple stakeholders ("crowd-sourced" design) with multi-scale models of ecosystem and human impacts. The primary research tasks include: (1) creation of integrated models to predict hydrologic, human, and ecosystem impacts of GI designs from site to catchment scales, (2) development of interactive methods for crowd-sourcing model parameterization and GI design, and (3) implementation of modeling and crowd-sourced design methods in a cyberinfrastructure (CI) framework. The models developed in this project will be among the first to integrate criteria for human wellbeing with site-and-watershed-scale hydrologic and ecologic processes. Furthermore, by advancing crowd-sourced interactive optimization and model parameterization, this project can influence other design processes where early, diverse input is important for design acceptance.