LEAP-HI: Catalyzing Resilient Urban Infrastructure Systems: Integrating the Natural and Built Environments

Green Infrastructure (GI) has the potential to reduce stormwater flows, prevent combined sewer overflows, store water, diminish nutrient and pollution loads, create habitats and jobs, and enhance social equity and quality of life in communities. Yet, we fail to see widespread adoption of GI integrated with Built Infrastructure (BI) to create high performing, resilient and adaptive systems successfully operating under a wide range of conditions. Without a rigorous engineering approach to quantify and predict GI's direct and indirect benefits, investment in the up-front costs of GI are difficult to justify and attract. The goal of the proposed project is to enable communities to maximize the potential of GI investments through the implementation of four interlinked objectives: (1) to design and deploy a sensor network that facilitates the acquisition of critical GI/BI data; (2) to predict dynamic, systems-level performance of integrated GI/BI networks; (3) to quantify direct and indirect benefits to improve estimates of GI value; (4) to tailor network designs that maximize GI/BI benefits and attract investment.