Designing Wetlands as an Essential Infrastructural Element for Urban Development in the era of Climate Change

Abstract

The increasing development of urban infrastructure has led to the significant loss of natural wetlands and their ecosystem services. Many novel urban development projects currently attempt to incorporate environmental sustainability, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and community engagement into the intricate challenges we all face in an era of climate change. This paper aims to communicate several key findings on design elements that can be adopted or incorporated in the design of created wetlands as infrastructural elements. Three major design elements—microtopography, hydrologic connectivity, and planting diversity—are presented, and their relations to restoring ecosystem services of urban wetlands, in particular water and habitat quality, are discussed. These design elements can be easily adopted or incorporated in the planning, designing, and construction stages of urban development. The success of urban infrastructure projects may require both better communication among stakeholders and a great deal of community engagement. The Rain Project, a floating wetland project on an urban college campus, demonstrates the role of interdisciplinary collaboration and community engagement as a model for sustainable stormwater management, a critical part of today’s urban development. Further efforts should be made to advance the science of designing urban wetlands and its communication to transform cultural attitudes toward sustainable urban development.

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Analyzing Questions of Justice Issues in Urban Greenspace

“…Therefore, it is necessary to direct resources to engagement efforts that require trust, which takes time and effort to achieve. Cross-disciplinary approaches show promise to successfully engage communities and bring people with different interests together [64]. Successful community engagement efforts show the need for collaboration not only among disciplines, but also between local and state governments, NGOs, schools, and community-based organizations [65].…”

“…From their successful community engagement work in Detroit, U.S., Hartig and Wallace [66] extract lessons that include the recruitment of a champion, the support of local groups, the development of a delivery team, an approach focused on outcomes, and the measurement of success. These efforts, when combined with a capacity building component can result in an enhanced sense of community and higher appreciation for the benefits of greenspace [64].…”

Urban stormwater characterization, control, and treatment

“…General recommendations to optimize constructed urban wetland performance were provided by Ahn and Schmidt (2019) and included microtopography (e.g., by disking or incorporating other construction practices to increase surface roughness and heterogeneity), plant diversity (e.g., by intentionally planting a diverse plant community), and hydrologic connectivity to pollutant sources. Another important optimization factor identified through CSW studies is hydraulic residence time (HRT).…”

Assessment of carbon storage potential of forested wetland soils as affected by urbanization degree in two different physiographic provinces of Virginia, USA

“…Despite such losses, urban-speci c environmental problems-speci cally, high atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations-have been addressed in part by prioritizing urban green spaces like urban forests and wetlands (Bae and Ryu 2015;Pulighe et al 2016;Säynäjoki et al 2018;Xue et al 2019). In the CBW, forested wetlands are particularly ingrained into the urban ecosystem and are used by planners, developers, and stormwater and wildlife managers to provide recreational space, encourage biodiversity, purify water, and/or control urban ooding (Ahn and Schmidt 2019;Duan et al 2020;Faller and McCleery 2017;Palta et al 2017;Pasterski et al 2020;Stefanakis 2019). Documented with non-wetland urban soils, wet forest and forested wetland soils in urban areas represent key opportunities to store large carbon pools, or carbon stocks, due to the slowed decomposition rates of organic matter that occur under saturated conditions (Canedoli et al 2020;Golubiewski 2006;Mitsch and Gosselink 2015;Pouyat et al 2006).…”