Native Plant Conservation Campaign News: Yale article surveys use of native plants and ecosystem services to tackle urban problems like storm management, water quality and flood control.

April 4, 2018

 

A recent article in Yale Environment 360, examines how Philadelphia and other cities around the U.S. and the world are developing and expanding green infrastructure to address stormwater management, groundwater recharge and other problems.  The severe hurricane damage in Florida and Texas last year is spurring leaders to find new ways to protect their communities.

 

According to the article, “Green infrastructure ranges from simple home rain barrels and downspout planters to complex bioretention swales underlain by drains, filled with sandy soil, and planted with resilient [native] species of grasses, perennials, shrubs, and trees. Along with rain gardens, tree trenches, green roofs, and urban wetlands, this infrastructure will, as one study put it, “optimize and engineer the landscape” to mimic and restore its natural hydrologic regime.”

 

Philadelphia’s Stormwater Retrofit Guidance Manual specifically encourages the use of natives in green infrastructure plantings.  As NPCC often states and the Manual notes,

 

 

Cities like Philadelphia are choosing green infrastructure over the more traditional “gray” infrastructure to manage stormwater. Gray infrastructure includes concrete basins and pipes and other human-made structures that have been used to channel stormwaters away from city centers. These approaches have become steadily more expensive and less effective as urban populations increase and as climate change has brought larger storms to many areas.

 

The article opens with a 1789 quote from Benjamin Franklin, showing that at least some people have understood the importance of using ecosystem services to store and purify water for centuries:

 

 

Read the full article in Yale Environment 360