Collaborative Research: Conceptualizing and quantifying the function of beaver dams and stormwater ponds on the hydrology and biogeochemistry of urban streams

合作研究：概念化和量化海狸坝和雨水池对城市溪流水文学和生物地球化学的功能

• 批准号: 2024421
• 负责人: Sandra Clinton
• 金额: $ 17.15万
• 依托单位: University of North Carolina at Charlotte
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-08-01 至 2025-01-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2024421&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Conceptualizing; quantifying; function

Cities across the United States are struggling with issues of storm water because buildings and roads cannot soak up rain like soil. Instead, rain that falls on cities runs off the buildings and roads. Cities are spending billions of dollars to manage this extra water. They are investing in green infrastructure, which is infrastructure on the land that can soak up and hold rainwater. One of these green infrastructure approaches is storm water ponds. However, across the southeastern U.S., beaver live in urban streams, and they build ponds, too. Beaver are considered a nuisance species and are often killed, even though their ponds may be similar to storm water ponds for slowing water and improving water quality. The first goal of this project is to compare how well beaver ponds store water during both dry and wet periods compared to storm water ponds. In addition to retaining and slowing the flow of storm water from cities, both beaver and storm water ponds receive nutrients than can feed algae blooms. The second goal of this project is to evaluate if urban beaver ponds increase the storage of nutrients and sediments from water that passes through their dams. This is important because it will improve downstream water quality. The final goal of this project is to map where beaver may be building these ponds in urban areas. This will inform city managers on what to do with the ponds. To determine if the ponds work the same way in different cities, this work will be conducted in Atlanta, GA, Charlotte, NC, and Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, NC. The project will provide multiple broader impacts, including increasing diversity in the geosciences, collaborating with conservation groups, such as Adopt-a-Stream and Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, to educate the general public about the benefits of beaver, and helping local watershed managers to better manage beaver and adopt benefits that might exist from their ponds. In addition, this research will be done at multiple minority serving institutions by a diverse group of investigators. The multi-institution project will allow students to collaborate across institutions. This project will test a conceptual model of how the physical features of urban beaver and stormwater ponds impact streamflow attenuation and water quality. Cities are spending billions of dollars on installing green infrastructure to capture stormwater runoff, when cities in the southeastern U.S. may have infrastructure that fills a similar role already in beaver ponds. The functioning of beaver ponds compared to stormwater ponds has not been systematically studied anywhere. This project aims at (1) quantifying the nutrient and sediment retention of beaver and stormwater ponds, (2) quantifying the transit time of water through beaver and stormwater ponds and floodplain-stream reconnection around dams at both high and low flow, and (3) using remote sensing products and GIS to estimate the total number of beaver ponds in cities and scale-up quantification of retention to the whole-city scale. The hypothesis for objectives 1 and 2 is that the hydrologic and nutrient retention response of the pond will be driven by the hydrologic source of the water—specifically inflows dominated by surface or groundwater—and readily quantifiable metrics of pond geomorphology. The hypothesis for objective 3 is that identified ponded water from aerial imagery can be combined with the drivers of beaver habitat, including stream slope and vegetation, to pinpoint locations of beaver activity. The project entails conducting field work on urban beaver dams and stormwater ponds in the Piedmont cities of Atlanta, GA, and Charlotte and Raleigh, NC to compare influent to effluent mass fluxes of nutrients and total suspended solids (TSS) over two years, sample hyporheic waters in the dam and floodplain to understand nutrient cycling in the sediments and quantify travel time distributions of water through beaver ponds and how they compare to engineered stormwater ponds. The proposed research will develop a conceptual framework through rigorous testing using intensive field studies that will yield new and transformative knowledge within the field of urban hydrological science. The study will be carried across a range of factors, including pond size, watershed land use, sediment, geology, and infrastructure age to assess controlling drivers and predict the response in other systems. In addition, larger-scale mapping of these systems will help to evaluate landscape-level impacts on entire cities.In addition to the intellectual merits, this project will increase diversity in STEM by recruiting underrepresented students to complete M.S. degrees at minority serving institutions, mentored by a diverse group of faculty. The project will also entail public outreach on the ecological benefits of beaver leveraging existing relationships with non-profit conservation groups. Beaver are considered a nuisance species, and thus to reap the benefits their ponds may have on hydrologic and nutrient retention, conversations between watershed managers and beaver pond neighbors must be facilitated to allow for science-based decisions on the fate of these ponds.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.

美国各地的城市都在努力解决雨水问题，因为建筑物和道路不能像土壤一样吸收雨水。相反，福尔斯落在城市里的雨水会从建筑物和道路上流走。城市正在花费数十亿美元来管理这些额外的水。他们正在投资于绿色基础设施，这是土地上的基础设施，可以吸收和容纳雨水。这些绿色基础设施方法之一是雨水池。然而，在美国东南部，海狸生活在城市的溪流中，它们也建造池塘。海狸被认为是一种令人讨厌的物种，经常被杀死，即使他们的池塘可能类似于雨水池塘，以减缓水流和改善水质。该项目的第一个目标是比较海狸池塘在干旱和潮湿时期与暴雨池塘相比如何储存水。除了保留和减缓来自城市的雨水流动，海狸和雨水池塘都获得了比藻类繁殖更多的营养。该项目的第二个目标是评估城市海狸池塘是否增加了通过水坝的水的营养物质和沉积物的储存。这一点很重要，因为它将改善下游水质。这个项目的最终目标是绘制海狸可能在城市地区建造这些池塘的地图。这将告知城市管理者如何处理池塘。为了确定池塘在不同城市的工作方式是否相同，这项工作将在佐治亚州亚特兰大、北卡罗来纳州夏洛特和北卡罗来纳州罗利-达勒姆-查佩尔山进行。该项目将产生多种更广泛的影响，包括增加地球科学的多样性，与保护团体合作，如河流保护组织和查特胡奇河流保护组织，教育公众海狸的好处，并帮助当地流域管理人员更好地管理海狸，并采用可能存在的好处。 此外，这项研究将在多个少数民族服务机构由不同的调查小组进行。多机构项目将允许学生跨机构合作。该项目将测试一个概念模型，说明城市海狸和雨水池塘的物理特征如何影响径流衰减和水质。城市正在花费数十亿美元安装绿色基础设施来收集雨水径流，而美国东南部的城市可能已经有了在海狸池塘中发挥类似作用的基础设施。河狸塘的功能与雨水塘相比，还没有在任何地方进行过系统的研究。该项目的目的是（1）量化海狸池塘和雨水池塘的营养物和沉积物滞留量，（2）量化水在高流量和低流量下通过海狸池塘和雨水池塘以及大坝周围的漫滩-溪流重新连接的过境时间，以及（3）使用遥感产品和地理信息系统估计城市中海狸池塘的总数，并将滞留量的量化扩大到整个城市规模。目标1和2的假设是，池塘的水文和营养物保留响应将由水的水文源驱动，特别是地表水或地下水为主的流入量，以及池塘地貌的易于量化的指标。目标3的假设是，确定积水从航空图像可以结合海狸栖息地的驱动程序，包括流坡和植被，以查明海狸活动的位置。该项目需要在皮埃蒙特城市亚特兰大，佐治亚州，夏洛特和罗利，北卡罗来纳州进行实地调查，比较营养物质和总悬浮固体（TSS）的流入和流出质量通量，在大坝和河漫滩中采集低流沃茨样本，以了解沉积物中的营养循环，并量化水通过海狸池塘的旅行时间分布及其比较到设计的雨水池。拟议的研究将通过使用密集的实地研究进行严格的测试来制定一个概念框架，这将在城市水文科学领域产生新的变革性知识。该研究将在一系列因素中进行，包括池塘大小，流域土地利用，沉积物，地质和基础设施年龄，以评估控制驱动因素并预测其他系统的响应。此外，这些系统的更大规模映射将有助于评估对整个城市的影响。除了智力优势，该项目将通过招募代表性不足的学生完成硕士学位来增加STEM的多样性。少数民族服务机构的学位，由不同的教师群体指导。该项目还将利用与非营利保护团体的现有关系，向公众宣传海狸的生态效益。海狸被认为是一种讨厌的物种，因此，为了获得他们的池塘可能对水文和营养保留的好处，流域管理者和海狸池塘邻居之间的对话必须得到促进，以便对这些池塘的命运做出基于科学的决定。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为是值得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来支持的。