ASLA 2016 Professional Research Award Winners / Giải thưởng ASLA 2016 Research Award

Landscape architects face increasing pressure to design high-performance landscapes in cities where regulatory requirements and underlying engineering models tend not to reflect the measurable capacity of green infrastructure within different contexts, particularly soil storage and evapotranspiration. Understanding how built green infrastructure performs is critical in informing new engineering models, advocating progressive regulations, and advancing sustainable landscape design. To help address this knowledge gap between science and policy, designers and scientific researchers collaboratively pursued a three-year study at a newly-built, non-infiltrating urban park. The team monitored runoff volume, water quality, soils, and vegetation to better understand the infrastructure’s performance and evaluated the long-term impacts of adaptive management. The designers modified maintenance protocols as needed to increase landscape performance. Findings reveal that the park has the potential to manage more than three times the stormwater that the engineering models predicted.