Stormwater Best Management Practices Database To Be Upgraded
An award-winning database of best management practices (BMPs) for dealing with stormwater– the International Stormwater Best Management Practices Database–has attracted a new coalition of partners to help in the funding and management of the project.
The database will be useful as communities, departments of transportation, and private parties plan to spend “potentially billions of dollars over the next several years as they implement BMPs for compliance with water quality regulatory programs,” said Jeff Moeller, program director at the Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF), one of the coalition partners.
Other coalition partners are the Environmental and Water Resources Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Public Works Association, and two federal agencies – the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Federal Highway Administration.
“The formation of a diverse coalition of organizations jointly committed to improving the knowledge and understanding of BMPs represents a new phase in the evolution of the BMP Database,” said Jeff Moeller, program director at WERF.
“These organizations represent the combined interests of municipalities, stormwater agencies, highway agencies, regulatory authorities, and consulting firms among others all working together on a significant endeavor,” Moeller said.
This database provides access to BMP performance data in a standardized format for about 200 BMP studies conducted over the past 15 years. The database may be searched and/or downloaded online and is available on CD-ROM.
The coalition has contracted with Wright Water Engineers and GeoSyntec Consultants to operate the database, grow it through the addition of new data on best management practices, and develop protocols for integrating low impact development techniques into the database.
Jon Jones of Wright Water Engineers and Eric Strecker of GeoSyntec Consultants will serve as co-principal investigators for the project. The project team has already identified over 35 new BMP data sets to be included in the database.
Initially developed under grants from the EPA by a team of stormwater experts associated with the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Urban Water Resources Research Council, the database provides a mechanism for scientifically based collection and management of data needed to evaluate the effectiveness of stormwater runoff BMPs.
For more information on the database, click here.
Provided by the Environmental News Service.
