Green Infrastructure Training for Veterans

摘要

The term green infrastructure has been in use for many years;; however, the context of green infrastructure has changed significantly. Green infrastructure was originally a strategic approach to land conservation, and defined as an 'interconnected network of green space that conserves natural ecosystem values and functions, sustains clean air and water and provides a wide array of benefits to human populations'.1 While this is still an accurate description, the engineering community has adopted it to refer to stormwater techniques or practices that will capture, infiltrate and/or slowly release stormwater, which is the definition that will be used for this paper. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refers to green infrastructure as natural vegetation, landscape design, and engineered techniques that retain, absorb, and often cleanse stormwater runoff.2 There are multiple benefits to implementation of green infrastructure including reduction of stormwater runoff, therefore reducing demands on traditional gray infrastructure, restoration of natural hydrological cycles, ecosystem restoration, reduction of nutrients entering downstream surface waters as well as social and economic benefits.