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

洪水造成的生命损失、财产和农作物损失比美国任何其他自然灾害都要多。防洪的结构性措施，如堤坝，仅限于流域的一小部分，其减少洪水的能力和强度有限。社区需要防洪解决方案，在流域提供更多的存储，是灵活的降水和土地利用变化的趋势，并在环境上可持续的。该项目将探索一种基于湿地蓄水动态管理的防洪方法。该战略将能够在降雨事件发生前数小时或数天从湿地中适应性地释放水，从而最大限度地提高储存能力，同时保持或增加湿地生态功能。该项目的具体目标是：（1）确定操纵水文周期的生态后果（水深随时间的变化）的湿地社区典型的哈里斯县，休斯敦;（2）创建一套模块化的主动控制，用于湿地蓄水量的动态管理，以及（3）研究湿地的大小（面积和可用蓄水量）与流域面积的关系，以及蓄水管理的程度，影响着流域范围内的洪水规模。为尽量减少生态影响，管理战略中将包括对水位下降的限制。目标1的任务包括进行中尺度生态系统实地实验，以确定哈里斯县典型湿地社区的各种水文周期操作的生态后果。这将评估所需的水文操纵（降雨事件之前的水位下降）和管理错误（降雨事件未能按预测实现）的生态影响。目标2的任务包括一套模块化的主动控制系统的现场测试，该系统用于湿地网络的远程操作，以进行蓄水管理。目标3的任务包括：（a）进行成本效益分析，以评估拟议的减少洪水规模的方法的可行性;（B）建立一个决策支持系统，以评估动态蓄水管理对流域洪水规模的影响。主要的教育目标是增加在本科工程课程的代表性不足的学生的参与。为此，该项目将在现有的推广计划中创建以防洪科学教学为重点的实践活动，主要针对代表性不足的中学生。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值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.