Collaborative Research: Urban Watershed Evolution - Novel Temporal Perspectives on the Hydrologic Impacts and Positive Unintended Consequences of Failing Municipal Infrastructure

Municipalities are increasingly challenged to use aged and failing infrastructure to deliver a continuous supply of clean water, and to return and treat wastewater, yet little is known about when, where, and how infrastructure failures were initiated or how they progressed. This project has three main scientific goals including: 1) determining the fate of municipal water after it leaves the engineered system and enters the natural hydrologic system, 2) unravel when, and under what conditions, infrastructure failure began, and 3) understanding how this failure and its impacts on water resources have progressed over time.

The primary project activities comprise using naturally-occurring chemical tracers in stream water and trees to reconstruct a history of water quality, and using historical data to reconstruct a history of infrastructure development. We expect our approach will be transferrable to other urban systems with aging infrastructure. Most broadly, this project will leverage our network of stakeholders to help inform city-level planning efforts to implement resilient infrastructure while accommodating rapid expansion of urban populations in the 21st century.

Results from this project will be incorporated across the sustainability curriculum at the University of Texas at Austin, which includes interdisciplinary degrees and 24 courses that emphasize field experiences and engage 800 students per year in on-campus environmental research along one of the proposed stream study sites, as well as geoscience graduate programs at UT Austin and the University of Arizona. Graduate and undergraduate student training will emphasize inclusion of underrepresented minorities.

At the onset of infrastructure failure in each Austin watershed, municipal water was introduced by leakage into relatively pristine natural hydrologic systems. We hypothesize that the distinct chemical compositions of these anthropogenic water sources were recorded in bald cypress trees at the onset of failure and in subsequent years as failure progressed.

This project comprises a novel application of natural isotopic tracers to examine the impacts of urbanization on natural hydrology and stream ecology in three watersheds in the same hydrogeologic terrain. The primary variable among the watersheds is the extent of urbanization. We will analyze elemental, and Sr isotope variations in stream water, and develop methods for high resolution measurements of the Sr isotopes in the growth rings of bald cypress trees growing adjacent to those streams.

We posit that the growth rate and isotopic composition of the tree rings encode a hydrologic history of the progressive failure of infrastructure. We will apply these data using hydrogeochemical models to: 1) trace the evolution of municipal water during its transmission through the natural hydrologic cycle in anthropogenically compromised watersheds; and 2) use dendrochemical variations to reconstruct decadally-resolved temporal changes in municipal water input to streams.

These results will be used to identify, for the first time, both the timing of the onset of infrastructure failure and temporal changes in the magnitude and impacts of the failure. We will compare this temporal record of municipal water input with the history of urban development in the same watersheds to determine the threshold for the extent of urbanization, above which hydrologic and ecological impacts of failing infrastructure are manifested.

This award is co-funded by the Hydrologic Sciences, Environmental Sustainability, and Environmental Engineering programs.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.