Del Monaco, Nicole. Reducing directly connected stormwater infrastructure and the associated benefits. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3SN0CT3
DescriptionThe emerging field of urban watershed protection often lacks a unifying goal to guide the efforts of many of its multi-disciplined participants – planners, engineers, landscape architects, scientists, and local officials. This lack of common goal has made it difficult to achieve a consistent result. This paper proposes to define a unifying goal based on a physically defined unit – imperviousness. Many studies have dealt with total impervious area (TIA), but often times this TIA contributes minimally to the pollutants that accumulate on impervious surfaces and wash into New Jersey’s waterways during storm events. The purpose of this study is to examine and quantify mitigation strategies that are designed to reduce the impacts of directly connected impervious areas (DCIA). It is the DCIA that are directly harming local streams, rivers, lakes and bays. By implementing green stormwater infrastructure in a given watershed to directly intercept the runoff washing off of these DCIA, water quality, aquatic life, runoff volumes, peak discharge, and baseflow impacts can be reduced, and stream quality can be improved.