CUERE Seminar: Dr. Tijana Jovanovic, SESYNC

Abstract 

Urban stormwater networks (USNs) are complex dendritic features composed of both artificial (pipes, culverts, etc.) and natural (streams, wetlands, etc.) components. Additionally, USNs play an important role in governing urban watershed response, and have a strong impact on ecosystem structure and function. So far, USNs have been studied on a case by case basis and focused on temporal but localized impacts (e.g. changes to hydrographs at discrete locations) or on a specific stormwater control measure. This is the case even though design and management strategies are implemented on local scales with aim to prevent the impact of USNs on watershed scale. I will present a modeling approach that allows one to study retrospectively hydrological fluxes and states in USNs. I will present results from an urban watershed in Scottsdale (AZ) to show how model outputs can be used to analyze over space and time the network properties of dendritic connectivity, heterogeneity, and scaling. For example, USNs over time tend to become more homogenous in terms of topological features but increasingly heterogeneous in terms of dynamic features. Furthermore, evolving management strategies may be beneficial to the USN but benefits may not propagate systematically through the network.