Using the hydrologic footprint residence for raising awareness of stormwater sustainability

The urbanization of watersheds leads to the degradation of watershed health, as increased areas of imperviousness produce alterations in the flow regime of receiving water bodies. While large infrastructure improvements, such as detention ponds, are typically implemented to manage excess runoff, a more decentralized approach that utilizes Low Impact Development (LID) design principles may better preserve the pre-development flow regime. Decentralized approaches, however, are more difficult to regulate, and homeowners and developers may be hesitant to adopt expensive technologies for stormwater control. A new stormwater sustainability metric, the hydrologic footprint residence (HFR), was recently introduced to measure more holistically the impacts of urbanization on the downstream residence. HFR measures changes to the flow regime as the area of land inundated for one unit of time in response to one rainfall event. It is the hypothesis of this work that HFR can be used to communicate the impacts of urbanization on watershed health more effectively than traditional stormwater metrics, such as peak flow. This paper describes a set of online interactive quizzes that were designed for educating about issues of stormwater sustainability and LID options, such as permeable pavements, rainwater harvesting, and cluster development. A survey was fielded to evaluate and compare the use of HFR and peak flow within the quiz for communicating to the general public about stormwater sustainability.