Floods are resulting in more loss of lives and damage to property and crops than any other natural disaster in the United States. Structural measures for flood control, such as levees, are constrained to only a small part of a watershed, and are limited in their capacity and robustness to reduce floods. Communities need flood control solutions that provide more storage in the watershed, are flexible to trends in precipitation and land use changes, and are environmentally sustainable. This project will explore an approach for flood control that is based on the dynamic management of water storage in wetlands across the landscape. The strategy will enable adaptive release of water from wetlands hours or days ahead of rainfall events, thereby maximizing storage capacity while at the same time maintaining or increasing wetland ecological function. The specific objectives of the project are to: (1) determine the ecological consequences of manipulating the hydroperiod (water depth changes over time) for wetland communities typical of Harris County, Houston; (2) create a set of modular active controls for dynamic management of storage in wetlands, and (3) examine how the size of wetlands (area and usable storage) in relation to the watershed area, and the degree of water storage management, impact the magnitude of floods at the watershed-scale. To minimize ecological impacts, constraints on water level reductions will be included in the management strategy. Tasks for Objective 1 include conducting a mesocosm field experiment that will determine the ecological consequences of a wide range of hydroperiod manipulations for wetland communities typical of Harris County. This will both assess the ecological impacts of desired hydrological manipulations (drawdown before rainfall events) and also of management mistakes (rainfall events that fail to materialize as predicted). Tasks for Objective 2 include field tests of a set of modular active controls for the remote operation of a network of wetlands for water storage management. Tasks for Objective 3 include (a) performing a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed approach for reducing the magnitude of floods; and (b) creating a Decision Support System (DSS) for evaluating the impact of dynamic water storage management on the magnitude of floods at the watershed-scale. The main educational goal is to increase participation of underrepresented students in undergraduate engineering programs. To this end, the project we will create hands-on activities focusing on flood control for science instruction in an existing outreach program, targeted primarily to underrepresented middle-school students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
