Dataset Information

Comparison of Measured and Simulated Urban Soil Hydrologic Properties.

ABSTRACT: Urban communities use hydrologic models to plan for and assess the effectiveness of stormwater control measures. Although emphasis is placed on soils as permeable surfaces that regulate the rainfall-runoff process, representative soil hydrologic parameters for urban areas are rare. The extent to which measured and commonly simulated hydrologic data may differ is also largely uncharacterized. As part of the US EPA urban soil assessment, infiltration and drainage rates were measured in 12 cities, and the authors compared these measured data to estimates generated from the EPA National Stormwater Calculator (NSWC), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Soil Survey Geographic Database (SSURGO), and USDA Rosetta. The analysis highlights the overall lack of soil hydrologic data for many cities in the NSWC and SSURGO and show that common prediction algorithms for infiltration and drainage poorly represent urban soil hydraulics. Paired comparison of field-measured values and model-estimated values resulted in root-mean-square errors ranging from 23 to 173 mm=h. These findings are presented in the context of planning for effective stormwater and wastewater management practices, and the need for confirming simulation results with site-specific field data.

SUBMITTER: Schifman LA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6436630 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Comparison of Measured and Simulated Urban Soil Hydrologic Properties.

Schifman L A LA Shuster W D WD

Journal of hydrologic engineering 20181027 1

Urban communities use hydrologic models to plan for and assess the effectiveness of stormwater control measures. Although emphasis is placed on soils as permeable surfaces that regulate the rainfall-runoff process, representative soil hydrologic parameters for urban areas are rare. The extent to which measured and commonly simulated hydrologic data may differ is also largely uncharacterized. As part of the US EPA urban soil assessment, infiltration and drainage rates were measured in 12 cities, ...[more]

PMID: 30930618

Similar Datasets

Project description:The integration of urban green spaces into modern city planning is seen as a promising tool to offset the drawbacks of ever-expanding cities. Urban agriculture is a common method to implement such strategies and to increase urban sustainability with a special focus on food security. Due to their location, urban farms are highly influenced by past and present anthropogenic activities which can threaten both soil health and food safety. This study includes 12 urban agriculture sites in the metropolitan area of Adelaide, Australia. It is the first of its kind to focus on soil health in urban agriculture systems with a further emphasis on mycorrhizal fungi. Descriptive information about each site, the biodiversity of the selected plots and soil samples from different depths and locations were collected and analysed for chemical and biological parameters. Seven metals, total and plant-available (Colwell) phosphorus and available nitrogen were measured in soils. A glasshouse bioassay was also conducted to determine the abundance of beneficial arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in the soils and the change of root colonization after inoculation with the mycorrhizal fungus Rhizophagus irregularis. Results showed a generally high biodiversity of plants that correlated with site activity (commercial or community garden) and which could potentially be used for urban biodiversity conservation. Metal concentrations in soils were below national guidelines levels for all samples, although sites with previous industrial history showed elevated levels when compared to sites without industrial history. The use of raised beds with introduced soils eliminated differences in previous land-use history, thereby providing a good option to support cleaner production. Gardening soils were considered highly fertile, with plant-available (Colwell) P concentrations exceeding recommended levels for most horticultural crops, while soils were adequately supplied with nitrogen. Most plant nutrients were derived from freely available urban waste streams and integrated via composting. Various urban waste streams could be used to counter-act imbalanced soil nutrients. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi were present in all sites, indicating that the practiced soil management is sustainable from a microbial perspective. Given their important role in supporting plant nutrition, and potential to reduce the need for external nutrient inputs, they provide an important focal point for achieving clean and sustainable urban food production. The results were incorporated into a framework for the management of urban soil health.

Project description:Even if urban catchments are adequately drained by sewer infrastructures, flooding hotspots develop where ongoing development and poor coordination among utilities conspire with land use and land cover, drainage, and rainfall. We combined spatially explicit land use/land cover data from Luohe City (central China) with soil hydrology (as measured, green space hydraulic conductivity), topography, and observed chronic flooding to analyze the relationships between spatial patterns in pervious surface and flooding. When compared to spatial-structural metrics of land use/cover where flooding was commonly observed, we found that some areas expected to remain dry (given soil and elevation characteristics) still experienced localized flooding, indicating hotspots with overwhelmed sewer infrastructure and a lack of pervious surfaces to effectively infiltrate and drain rainfall. Next, we used curve numbers to represent the composite hydrology of different land use/covers within both chronic flooding and dry (non-flooding) circles of 750 m diameter, and local design storms to determine the anticipated average proportion of runoff. We found that dry circles were more permeable (curve number (mean ± std. error) = 74 ± 2, n = 25) than wetter, flooded circles (curve number = 87 ± 1). Given design storm forcing (20, 50, 100 years' recurrence interval, and maximum anticipated storm depths), dry points would produce runoff of 26 to 35 percent rainfall, and wet points of 52 to 61 percent of applied rainfall. However, we estimate by simulation that runoff reduction benefits would decline once infiltration-excess (Hortonian) runoff mechanisms activate for storms with precipitation rates in excess of an average of 21 mm/h, contingent on antecedent moisture conditions. Our spatial metrics indicate that larger amounts and patches of dispersed green space mitigate flooding risk, while aggregating buildings (roofs) and green space into larger, separate areas exacerbates risk.

Project description:Soils lie at the interface between the atmosphere and the subsurface and are a key component that control ecosystem services, food production, and many other processes at the Earth's surface. There is a long-established convention for identifying and mapping soils by texture. These readily available, georeferenced soil maps and databases are used widely in environmental sciences. Here, we show that these traditional soil classifications can be inappropriate, contributing to bias and uncertainty in applications from slope stability to water resource management. We suggest a new approach to soil classification, with a detailed example from the science of hydrology. Hydrologic simulations based on common meteorological conditions were performed using HYDRUS-1D, spanning textures identified by the United States Department of Agriculture soil texture triangle. We consider these common conditions to be: drainage from saturation, infiltration onto a drained soil, and combined infiltration and drainage events. Using a k-means clustering algorithm, we created soil classifications based on the modeled hydrologic responses of these soils. The hydrologic-process-based classifications were compared to those based on soil texture and a single hydraulic property, Ks. Differences in classifications based on hydrologic response versus soil texture demonstrate that traditional soil texture classification is a poor predictor of hydrologic response. We then developed a QGIS plugin to construct soil maps combining a classification with georeferenced soil data from the Natural Resource Conservation Service. The spatial patterns of hydrologic response were more immediately informative, much simpler, and less ambiguous, for use in applications ranging from trafficability to irrigation management to flood control. The ease with which hydrologic-process-based classifications can be made, along with the improved quantitative predictions of soil responses and visualization of landscape function, suggest that hydrologic-process-based classifications should be incorporated into environmental process models and can be used to define application-specific maps of hydrologic function.

Dataset Information

Comparison of Measured and Simulated Urban Soil Hydrologic Properties.

Publications

Comparison of Measured and Simulated Urban Soil Hydrologic Properties.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets