We are proud to share the final product of a 3 year collaboration between Stewardship Partners, WSU and the City of Puyallup (with funding from the Stormwater Action Network). This assessment protocol is helping us all find out what is working and what isn’t in rain gardens across the region and what priority maintenance issues to plan for.
Learn about SAM studies on how well bioretention treats and reduces stormwater runoff:
Are all those rain gardens out there working?
Written by Stewardship Partners
Volunteers assessing a rain garden.
While there is little doubt that rain gardens are effective tools in managing stormwater and runoff in general, we’ve wanted to track how real-world rain gardens fair over time and geography since we started the 12,000 Rain Garden Campaign back in 2011. As it turns out, local governments across Western Washington want to know how they are doing as well.
In February, Stewardship Partners, WSU Jefferson, Thurston, and Snohomish Extensions, and the City of Puyallup wrapped up a 3-year project to develop an easy to use assessment protocol for rain gardens and “bioretention facilities” (more highly engineered rain gardens). Funded by the Stormwater Action Monitoring (SAM) program that manages pooled resources from Western Washington local governments, over 80 volunteers and 40 sites across 4 counties were involved in this study. The primary goal of this project was to create an assessment tool that would make it easier for every community to assess their own rain gardens, streamlining and standardizing the data being collected so we can learn about general trends and improve rain garden design and maintenance strategies.
In 2011 we set out on a mission to identify and register 12,000 rain garden projects throughout Puget Sound. And we are happy to announce that we are officially half way to that goal! Community groups and local jurisdictions across the region have worked with us to register their rain gardens through 12000raingardens.org and soundimpacts.org, officially totaling 6,202 projects!
It’s a Wrap: the 4th Annual Puget Sound Green Infrastructure Summit
Written by Stewardship Partners
On February 7th, the forecast was dire. Snow-pocolypse was imminent. Stewardship Partner’s marquee professional event of the year, the Puget Sound Green Infrastructure Summit, was scheduled for the next day. Food had been prepared and purchased, 250 people registered, 40 speakers confirmed, agendas printed, cars packed to the gills, but the choice was clear, we had to reschedule and let everyone know immediately to make sure none of our partners would be in harm’s way from what ended up being a multi-week winter storm across the region.
Attendees participating in one of the challenge topics. (Photo credit: The Nature Conservancy)
Flash forward six weeks as 260 people arrive at Cascadia College’s Salmon-Safe certified campus and begin to connect and reconnect with fellow Green Infrastructure leaders from the whole Puget Sound region and from each of the four sectors (connecting the dots: .com, .gov, .org, and .edu). It couldn’t have been a more uplifting contrast. The sun was out, and virtually every speaker was able to reschedule for the new date of March 22.
And what an amazing event we had! We grounded ourselves in a history of human relationships to land, water, fish, trees, and whales that dates back 10,000 years to the last ice age, and we consciously chose to create a learning and collaborative community. We applauded the ways that many redevelopment efforts are adding density and jobs while simultaneously reversing negative environmental impacts and we dove deep into the sticky issue of how we are going to retrofit a century’s worth of hardscaping to treat our wealth of rain like the vital resource it is.
Youth Voices panel participants. (Photo credit: The Nature Conservancy)
Our attendees were challenged to make this emerging and growing field a source of good jobs and education for the passionate and increasingly diverse generation entering today’s job market who don’t see themselves reflected in our ranks nor see pathways to change that fact. We laid out 16 challenge topics to network and build coalitions around, and 6 breakout sessions to dive deeper into specific hot topics related to retrofits and voluntary green stormwater infrastructure.
There is no way to summarize just how hopeful and meaningful of a day it was, but when co-chair of the Orca Task Force, Stephanie Solien, took the stage at the end of the day to call us to action, it was so great to hear her say that it was in fact she who felt called to action by the summit and the amazing group of doers who showed up and take action every day. I think that sentiment was shared by all and is the reason that we are already looking forward to the 5th Annual Green Infrastructure Summit in 2020. And maybe we’ll stick with late March instead of February! Huge thanks to the amazing team at SP, truly all hands were on deck, plus our brilliant host committee and generous sponsors, volunteers, and all those people who adjusted their calendars to make it work.
Thank you to our 2019 Host Committee Members & Sponsors who helped make this event a huge success!
