Toward a geoinformatics framework for understanding the social and biophysical influences on urban nutrient pollution due to residential impervious service connectivity

Water sustainability has been recognized as a fundamental problem of science whose solution relies in part on high-performance computing. Stormwater management is a major concern of urban sustainability. Understanding interactions between urban landcover and stormwater nutrient pollution requires consideration of fine-scale residential stormwater management, which in turn requires high-resolution LIDAR and landcover data not provided through national spatial data infrastructure, as well as field observation at the household scale. The objectives of my research are twofold: (1) advance understanding of the relationship between residential stormwater management practices and the export of nutrient pollution from stormwater in urbanized ecosystems; and (2) improve the informatics workflows used in community ecohydrology modeling as applied to heterogeneous urbanized ecosystems. In support of these objectives, I present preliminary results from initial work to: (1) develop an ecohydrology workflow platform that automates data preparation while maintaining data provenance and model metadata to yield reproducible workflows and support model benchmarking; (2) perform field observation of existing patterns of residential rooftop impervious surface connectivity to stormwater networks; and (3) develop Regional Hydro-Ecological Simulation System (RHESSys) models for watersheds in Baltimore, MD (as part of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) NSF Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site) and Durham, NC (as part of the NSF Urban Long-Term Research Area (ULTRA) program); these models will be used to simulate nitrogen loading resulting from both baseline residential rooftop impervious connectivity and for disconnection scenarios (e.g. roof drainage to lawn v. engineered rain garden, upslope v. riparian). This research builds on work done as part of the NSF EarthCube Layered Architecture Concept Award where a RHESSys workflow is being implemented in an iRODS (integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) environment. Modeling the ecohydrology of urban ecosystems in a reliable and reproducible manner requires a flexible scientific workflow platform that allows rapid prototyping with large-scale spatial datasets and model refinement integrating expert knowledge with local datasets and household surveys.