After working with the City of Omaha through 2007 to help them find greenspace within one small subbasin (in a City of more than 50 subbasins) for installation of stormwater green infrastructure, my coworker and I were finally hired to run our kick-ass proprietary Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI), Landsat ETM+ Remote Sensing Urban Reclass (LARSUR), and BMP Locator models on the entire City - um, we have published these models with EPA, WEF, EWRI, and other badass international agencies. The purpose of this task was to interface with the multi-billion dollar (no shit) municipal stormwater infrastructure upgrade program to help them replace the traditional technology of pipes and tanks with the much better and healthier technology of greenspace and plants.
Well, although we spent a year impressing Omaha to win this project, we only spent 2 weeks actually doing the project. Because the good work that you want to do, that is good for the culture, always goes away so fast. Its like, the better the work, the faster and more efficiently a person can do that good work. Well, anyways, I wanted to share some quick visual results with the 0 (read zero) readers that have actually viewed this website. So here it is:
This is the BMP Locator Analysis for Omaha - Where dark areas are most appropriate for BMP installation. Cool huh? Well, cool or not, its well researched and high technology science, that ultimately will help reduce energy intensive infrastructure, chemical wastewater treatment, increase water quality in the Missouri River, and provide internal vegetated and stream corridor linkages within the City to reduce vehicular use (read, provides space for kick ass mountain bike trails and water filtration and native floral and faunal habitat). Yes, we rock. But that is not all:
The above image shows where tree canopy and open space exist within Omaha. This image was created from space based imagery, were we extracted only the reflected wavelengths that signify dirt open space, agriculture, vegetated open space, and tree canopy (ie, applied technology and statistics to read minutely varying wavelengths from spaced based imagery to tell me where plants and trees exist). Yes, this is bad ass, and the result as you can see is that Omaha doesnt have very much vegetation left within their city - this is something they need to work on.
So to help them work on it, we put all our models together to create a parcel base analysis that not only shows where parcels can be retrofitted, but how efficient they might be at removing water volumes from the traditional pipe-n- tank-n-treatment plant systems. It looks like this:
In this image, green and blue spaces are the best opportunities to capture and infiltrate water, red indicates low quality opportunities to infiltrate water, and white means - well, it means dont put stormwater here. As you can see, there is logic in layers as my handle indicates, because im not messing around. This is real science, real technology, real clients, real money, real change, real benefits for our one and only EARTH, real benefits for HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS(ie, YOU), and most importantly real benefits for all the resources and species that support HSS. You want me to come to your city and do this analysis, because it will beautify your city, save you tax money, and provide you the bragging rights of living in a green city. Oh, I also wanted to include the flow diagram of this modeling process:
Model (Ma 'dul) - A mathematic algorithm that simulates a system. In this case, Earth. Each box is composed of a model (ie math + research + field experience + computer technology), thus, this model is actually a metamodel, a model composed of several models
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So, at this point, Im sure you are bored and possibly don't understand what I just said, so im just going to ride my bike home to my kick-ass 100-year old urban core three story brick and oak house while you drive your car back to the suburbs to live in your crappy pine and sheetrock rectangle.
-LL
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