Impacts of urbanization on West Nose Creek: a Canadian experience

2006 ◽  
Vol 53 (10) ◽  
pp. 237-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. van Duin ◽  
J. Garcia

The lower reaches of West Nose Creek have been subject to urbanization since the 1970s, leading to channel widening and excessive erosion. This paper discusses what would likely happen if urbanization were allowed to continue in the same manner. Comparisons are presented of the channel width and depth for both the upstream rural and downstream urbanizing reaches. Estimates of the evolution of the creek were generated by linking the dominant discharge to the entire shape and volume of the hydrograph that the creek is subjected to rather than solely considering peak discharges. Potential remedial measures and stormwater management philosophies are discussed in relationship to instream flow needs (IFNs) initiatives. IFNs are generally developed by relating the amount of suitable aquatic habitat to the quantity of flow. The emphasis has so far been on IFNs for large river systems. Unfortunately, none of the IFN approaches cover streams that are subject to significant urbanization. In urbanized streams the issue is not as much the impacts due to withdrawals but due to significantly increased runoff rates and volumes generated within the urban areas. Examples are provided how fisheries habitat is impacted by the changed hydrologic regime and changed stream morphology.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 1443
Author(s):  
Fawaz Alharbi ◽  
Meshal Almoshaogeh ◽  
Md. Shafiquzzaman ◽  
Husnain Haider ◽  
Md. Rafiquzzaman ◽  
...  

Permeable pavement provides sustainable solutions for urban stormwater management. In this research, the potential of rice bran mixed porous clay bricks were evaluated for permeable pavements. Physical, mechanical and hydrological properties along with stormwater treatment capabilities of the brick samples were assessed. The study found that ratio of rice bran and clay soil has significant impacts on the properties of the produced bricks. Water adsorption and porosity increased with increasing rice bran ratio. Compressive strength of brick samples decreased from 29.6 MPa to 6.9 MPa when the ratio of rice bran was increased from 0% to 20%. The permeability coefficient increased from 4 × 10−4 to 1.39 × 10−2 mm/s with the increase in rice bran from 0% to 30%. The preamble clay bricks were efficient to remove turbidity, total suspended solids (TSS), five days’ biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5), and heavy metals (Mn, Cu, and Zn) from stormwater to meet the World Health Organization (WHO) standard for wastewater reuse application. The bricks with ≤10% of rice bran achieved the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standard of the desire compressive strength and permeability coefficient for pedestrian and light traffic pavements. The porous bricks prepared in this study can be used to construct permeable pavements and would be a sustainable low impact developments technique for stormwater management in urban areas.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1972
Author(s):  
Jeremy Wright ◽  
Jeremy Lytle ◽  
Devon Santillo ◽  
Luzalen Marcos ◽  
Kristiina Valter Mai

Urban densification and climate change are creating a multitude of issues for cities around the globe. Contributing factors include increased impervious surfaces that result in poor stormwater management, rising urban temperatures, poor air quality, and a lack of available green space. In the context of volatile weather, there are growing concerns regarding the effects of increased intense rainfalls and how they affect highly populated areas. Green roofs are becoming a stormwater management tool, occupying a growing area of urban roof space in many developed cities. In addition to the water-centric approach to the implementation of green roofs, these systems offer a multitude of benefits across the urban water–energy–food nexus. This paper provides insight to green roof systems available that can be utilized as tools to mitigate the effects of climate change in urbanized areas. A new array of green roof testing modules is presented along with research methods employed to address current issues related to food, energy and water performance optimization. Rainwater runoff after three rain events was observed to be reduced commensurate with the presence of a blue roof retention membrane in the testbed, the growing media depth and type, as well as the productive nature of the plants in the testbed. Preliminary observations indicate that more productive green roof systems may have increasingly positive benefits across the water–energy–food nexus in dense urban areas that are vulnerable to climate disruption.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Concepcion Pla ◽  
Javier Valdes-Abellan ◽  
Miguel Angel Pardo ◽  
Maria Jose Moya-Llamas ◽  
David Benavente

<p>The impervious nature of urban areas is mostly responsible for urban flooding, runoff water pollution and the interception of groundwater recharge. Green infrastructure and sustainable urban drainage systems combine natural and artificial measures to mitigate the abovementioned problems, improving stormwater management and simultaneously increasing the environmental values of urban areas. The actual rate of urban growth in many urban areas requires the enhancement and optimization of stormwater management infrastructures to integrate the territorial development with the natural processes. Regarding the quality of runoff stormwater, heavy metals are critical for their impact on human health and ecological systems, even more if we consider the cumulative effect that they produce on biota. Thus, innovative stormwater management approaches must consider new solutions to deal with heavy metal pollution problems caused by runoff. In this study, we propose the employment of Arlita<sup>®</sup> and Filtralite<sup>®</sup>, two kind of lightweight aggregates obtained from expanded clays, to remove heavy metal concentration from runoff stormwater. Laboratory experiments were developed to evaluate the removal rate of different heavy metals existent in runoff stormwater. The lightweight aggregates acted as filter materials in column experiments to quantify their removal capacity. In addition, batch tests were also developed to evaluate the exhaustive capacity of the materials. Results from the study confirmed the efficiency of the selected lightweight aggregates to reduce the heavy metals concentration by up to 90% in urban stormwater runoff.</p>


Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 2392
Author(s):  
Nikolay Kasimov ◽  
Galina Shinkareva ◽  
Mikhail Lychagin ◽  
Sergey Chalov ◽  
Margarita Pashkina ◽  
...  

The partitioning of metals and metalloids between their dissolved and suspended forms in river systems largely governs their mobility and bioavailability. However, most of the existing knowledge about catchment-scale metal partitioning in river systems is based on a limited number of observation points, which is not sufficient to characterize the complexity of large river systems. Here we present an extensive field-based dataset, composed of multi-year data from over 100 monitoring locations distributed over the large, transboundary Selenga River basin (of Russia and Mongolia), sampled during different hydrological seasons. The aim is to investigate on the basin scale, the influence of different hydroclimatic conditions on metal partitioning and transport. Our results showed that the investigated metals exhibited a wide range of different behaviors. Some metals were mostly found in the dissolved form (84–96% of Mo, U, B, and Sb on an average), whereas many others predominantly existed in suspension (66–87% of Al, Fe, Mn, Pb, Co, and Bi). Nevertheless, our results also showed a consistently increasing share of metals in dissolved form as the metals were transported to the downstream parts of the basin, closer to the Lake Baikal. Under high discharge conditions (including floods), metal transport by suspended particulate matter was significantly greater (about 2–6 times). However, since high and low water conditions could prevail simultaneously at a given point of time within the large river basin, e.g., as a result of on-going flood propagation, snap-shot observations of metal partitioning demonstrated contrasting patterns with domination of both particulate and dissolved phases in different parts of the basin. Such heterogeneity of metal partitioning is likely to be found in many large river systems. These results point out the importance of looking into different hydroclimatic conditions across space and time, both for management purposes and contaminant modeling efforts at the basin scale.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (31) ◽  
pp. 39413-39426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wan Su ◽  
Juan Tao ◽  
Jun Wang ◽  
Chengzhi Ding

2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Herzog ◽  
David E. Ostendorf ◽  
Robert A. Hrabik ◽  
Valerie A. Barko
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (7) ◽  
pp. 587-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ambika Khadka ◽  
Teemu Kokkonen ◽  
Tero J. Niemi ◽  
Elisa Lähde ◽  
Nora Sillanpää ◽  
...  

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