Online – Water Wonks Lecture 7: The Effectiveness of Using Green Stormwater Infrastructure for Meeting Urban Challenges

Join the Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance for a free webinar as part of their Water Wonks series!

The Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance is hosting our 2024 Water Wonks Lecture Series at 3:30 p.m. on the 4th Wednesday of each month. Water Wonks is a free community education opportunity featuring a host of experts sharing innovative ideas and details about their work in the world of water.

Our Lecture #7 speaker, Lee Marlowe, is a restoration ecologist with over 25 years of professional experience working in the field of ecological restoration and natural resource management including sustainable landscape practices and applications for improved ecological functions.

Lee will speak on The San Antonio River Authority’s promotion of Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) practices for over a decade. As part of that effort, the River Authority has installed a variety of GSI practices on multiple urban properties to serve as demonstration sites showing the varied stacked benefits that can arise from GSI applications. In this session, Lee will highlight urban demonstration projects and their effectiveness at meeting many of our urban challenges such as stormwater pollutant loads, flow volume, and flow rates; as well as the lack of healthy ecosystems, wildlife habitat, native species biodiversity, and landscape resiliency typically found in urban environments. 

The River Authority has been incorporating GSI practices at their two major urban office facilities through various retrofit projects that began in 2013. Projects and outcomes that will be highlighted include a test site for the effectiveness of high flow media for pollutant filtration and flow reduction of parking lot runoff, and examples showing the benefits of urban nature-based infrastructure projects incorporating local native plants that provide habitat for resident and migratory wildlife including species of international significance and unexpected species outside of their typical range. These demonstration projects are used by River Authority staff to provide additional beneficial outcomes through education and outreach that informs and inspires community-based resource stewardship and biodiversity conservation.