Dynamic Management of Water Storage in Watersheds for Reducing the Magnitude of Floods

在美国，洪水造成的生命损失和财产和农作物损失比任何其他自然灾害都要多。防洪的结构措施，如堤防，仅限于流域的一小部分，其减少洪水的能力和稳健性有限。社区需要防洪解决方案，在分水岭提供更多的存储，对降水和土地利用变化的趋势灵活，并在环境上可持续。该项目将探索一种基于整个景观中湿地蓄水的动态管理的防洪方法。该战略将使湿地能够在降雨事件发生前几小时或几天自适应地释放水分，从而在保持或增加湿地生态功能的同时最大限度地增加存储容量。该项目的具体目标是：(1)确定操纵水期(水深随时间变化)对休斯敦哈里斯县典型湿地社区的生态后果；(2)为湿地蓄水量的动态管理创建一套模块化的主动控制措施；以及(3)研究湿地面积(面积和可用蓄水量)相对于流域面积的大小和蓄水管理程度如何影响流域尺度上的洪水规模。为尽量减少对生态的影响，管理策略将包括限制水位下降。目标1的任务包括进行一项中观实地试验，以确定哈里斯县典型湿地社区广泛的水期操作的生态后果。这将评估所需的水文操作(降雨事件之前的降雨量)和管理失误(未能按预测实现的降雨事件)的生态影响。目标2的任务包括对一套模块化主动控制进行实地测试，以实现湿地网络的远程操作，以进行储水管理。目标3的任务包括：(A)进行成本效益分析，以评估所提议的减少洪水严重程度办法的可行性；(B)建立一个决策支持系统，以评估动态蓄水管理对流域范围内洪水严重程度的影响。主要的教育目标是增加未被充分代表的学生参与本科工程课程。为此，我们将在现有的外展计划中为科学教学创建以防洪为重点的实践活动，主要针对未被充分代表的中学生。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Floods are resulting in more loss of lives and damage to property and crops than any other natural disaster in the United States. Structural measures for flood control, such as levees, are constrained to only a small part of a watershed, and are limited in their capacity and robustness to reduce floods. Communities need flood control solutions that provide more storage in the watershed, are flexible to trends in precipitation and land use changes, and are environmentally sustainable. This project will explore an approach for flood control that is based on the dynamic management of water storage in wetlands across the landscape. The strategy will enable adaptive release of water from wetlands hours or days ahead of rainfall events, thereby maximizing storage capacity while at the same time maintaining or increasing wetland ecological function. The specific objectives of the project are to: (1) determine the ecological consequences of manipulating the hydroperiod (water depth changes over time) for wetland communities typical of Harris County, Houston; (2) create a set of modular active controls for dynamic management of storage in wetlands, and (3) examine how the size of wetlands (area and usable storage) in relation to the watershed area, and the degree of water storage management, impact the magnitude of floods at the watershed-scale. To minimize ecological impacts, constraints on water level reductions will be included in the management strategy. Tasks for Objective 1 include conducting a mesocosm field experiment that will determine the ecological consequences of a wide range of hydroperiod manipulations for wetland communities typical of Harris County. This will both assess the ecological impacts of desired hydrological manipulations (drawdown before rainfall events) and also of management mistakes (rainfall events that fail to materialize as predicted). Tasks for Objective 2 include field tests of a set of modular active controls for the remote operation of a network of wetlands for water storage management. Tasks for Objective 3 include (a) performing a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed approach for reducing the magnitude of floods; and (b) creating a Decision Support System (DSS) for evaluating the impact of dynamic water storage management on the magnitude of floods at the watershed-scale. The main educational goal is to increase participation of underrepresented students in undergraduate engineering programs. To this end, the project we will create hands-on activities focusing on flood control for science instruction in an existing outreach program, targeted primarily to underrepresented middle-school students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.