hotspot area for green infrastructure NY, United States

(Bio)swale

Created at: 09 Apr 2022

Description

hotspot area for green infrastructure NY, United States Sites included a distribution of engineered green infrastructure installations (bioswales and green roofs) and non-engineered tree pits and park lawns. Although all urban sites are engineered in the sense that they are human-made habitats, green roofs and bioswales constructed as part of NYC’s Green Infrastructure Plan use standard designs with specified substrate particle size, pH, nutrient content, plant communities, management protocols, infrastructural functions, and many other attributes (NYC Department of Environmental Protection [DEP], 2017). We sampled tree pits and park lawns as conventional, non-engineered GI soils control sites not constructed or maintained according to the same guidelines, allowing us to address whether GI sites have distinct microbial composition within the broader landscape of urban microhabitats. Engineered GI sites included green roofs and two types of bioswales: relatively small right-of-way swales (5–6 feet wide by 10–20 feet long) built into pedestrian sidewalks, and larger streetside swales often occupying a corner or median area not along pedestrian throughways (NYC Department of Environmental Protection [DEP], 2017). Thirty-four of the sites were conventional tree pits, 13 were right-of-way (ROW) bioswales, 12 were streetside (SS) infiltration swales (also called stormwater greenstreets), 3 were park lawns, and 11 were green roofs. Soil or growing media was sampled from each site using a soil corer 2.5 cm in diameter. The corer was cleaned with ethanol between collection of each sample. Cores were stored in sterile Whirl-Pak bags (Nasco, United States), and frozen at −20°C after being stored in a cooler for 2–4 h from the time of sampling. Four 10 cm cores were taken for each sample. One sample was taken from each conventional tree pit (roughly 4 × 5 ft.), ROW bioswale (5 ft. wide by 10, 15, or 20 ft. long), and SS swales which can be two to three times larger than ROW swales (NYC Department of Environmental Protection [DEP], 2017). Three to ten samples were taken from much larger park lawns and green roofs—for each of these samples cores were taken from four contiguous 1 m × 3 m areas arranged as a grid.


Samenvatting (Dutch description)

hotspot area for green infrastructure NY, United States

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Floris Boogaard

• Submitted 2063 projects
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• Netherlands

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