- All right, thank you everyone for joining us today.
This is the Changing Communities chat of the conference.
I will first introduce Karl.
He is the Watershed Specialist with the U.S. Forest Service
and will present Vermont's Resilient Right-of-Ways Project.
- Great, thanks.
I know we have a limited amount of time,
so I'm gonna jump right in here.
What I'm gonna speak to you today about
is a project that was done by the Vermont Forest Parks
and Recreation Department.
And this is a landscape scale restoration
grant funded project from the U.S. Forest Service.
The way folks are able to receive these grants
is to scan the state's Forest Action Plan,
which every state has, it's required by the fund bill
and identify some objectives that they have a project
that can help meet those objectives.
So in this case, Vermont wanted to improve
their green infrastructure capabilities
in both rural and urban areas.
And so Elise Schadler and Joanne Garton
were two exemplary staff members
from Vermont's Urban and Community Forestry Program
that put this project together
and I was the grant monitor.
So I'm gonna explain to you what they did
and how they did it and maybe some ways
you might take this to your own communities.
So the goal of this project was to develop ways
that we can collaborate in green infrastructure management
across the board, both in rural
and in urban roadside environments.
And the reason they're doing this is because Lake Champlain,
like many other large water bodies in the United States,
suffers from the influx of nutrients
from a variety of land uses.
And so they have a total maximum daily load
or a TMDL imposed on the lake
to help limit phosphorous runoff into Lake Champlain.
So that's how this project kind of began.
So how did they do this?
Well, they had a kickoff meeting
bringing a lot of partners together.
They prioritized all of their needs with GIS tools.
They developed a number of technical resources,
and those are the ones that I'm gonna explain to you today.
Those included a Green Streets Guide,
a Resilient Right-of-Ways Guide,
a Better Back Roads Manual,
and all of these are available online
to help road managers in these urban
and rural environments to help manage their roads
in a green way.
So we delivered all these products to our partners
across the state, looking at 10 different urban
and 10 different rural communities as a case study.
And so for each of them,
we developed presentations for those communities
to think about as they continued managing their roads
across the state.
This is a list of some of the partners that are involved.
The Vermont Agency of Commerce and Development,
their State Transportation Agency, the DEC,
GIS staff, UVM, the League of Cities and Towns.
And then we had a couple of consultants.
Greenleaf Design, Watershed Consulting LLC,
and Dubois and King that were very helpful
in pulling this information together.
So I'm gonna break this up into two components.
The first of them is an urban component.
So as I mentioned, we looked at 10 urban environments
to try and figure out better ways
with which they could manage their streetscapes.
So why are we doing this?
Well, the Vermont Clean Water Act required communities
with either three acres of existing impervious surface
or one acre of new impervious surface
to apply for general permits.
There's also communities that have to comply
with the TMDL that I mentioned earlier.
And some of these standards could be difficult
for communities to uphold.
So that's why the state realized maybe they need some help
and some guidance.
Hence, the development of this guide.
So the guide wanted to do a couple of things.
Consider how they could plan for improvements
on their streetscapes and install trees
and other plants materials.
How do they choose the right site
with which to install these green infrastructure techniques?
Importantly, how do they implement
and then maintain these ecosystems in an urban environment?
And this is often a stumbling block,
which I will explain a little bit later.
It's not like your traditional road maintenance
that basically requires you to sweep and plow.
And then we gave them some examples
of different success stories across the state
that they could consider.
And all of this was, again,
assembled in a Green Streets Guide.
A number of outreach and training events occurred
across the state, whether it was Arbor Day
or urban and community partner conferences.
They had some virtual trainings and conferences
and forums across the state to roll this out
and to get information from interested parties
across the state to customize this training product.
So I mentioned 10 municipal communities
were involved in this.
The map on the right of the screen shows in light gray,
the Lake Champlain watershed,
which covers about 1/3 to perhaps 50% of the state,
in the left side of the state.
And the stars indicate the communities that we worked in.
They're kinda hard to see,
but if you'll scroll through the slides,
you'll see the towns will come up.
There was a team of people involved from the state,
from Vermont League of Cities and Towns.
And again, we had a couple of consultants
that worked on this and some graduate students
that were very helpful.
And they prioritized these communities
across the Lake Champlain basin.
They developed an MOU which each community signed,
which would provide them a variety of tools.
They received a couple of photo simulations,
which would show them what Green Stormwater Infrastructure,
or GSI, would look like in their community.
They reviewed the existing ordinances
that these 10 communities had
to look at some of their public works,
ordinances, and plans that were already in place.
And they met with each of the towns
to give them a final presentation
on some potential strategies for the future.
And so this is a list of the towns, excuse me,
across the state that were the 10 cities
that we were working with across Vermont.
And I'll go into a little bit more detail
in the next slides.
So I'm gonna go through a series of photo simulations
to show you how we hope towns can consider
using Green Stormwater Infrastructure.
So in this case, an existing street in Shelburne
shows a street with a wide curb,
some green grass, and a fire hydrant.
So what could this look like
if they want to incorporate Green Stormwater Infrastructure?
Well, they would add a couple of bump-outs
into the breakdown lane of this particular street
of the parking lane.
Provide some plants and trees to absorb surface water runoff
and absorb the nutrients and water and slowly release those
or treat those in engineered soils
beneath the planting structures.
Here's your traditional parking lot at a,
or it could be a supermarket somewhere.
This is in Williston.
So you have a couple of islands in the foreground
that show some trees and plantings.
The problem here is those are all elevated
and there's no way for the stormwater,
unless it was extraordinarily high,
to infiltrate that raised basin.
So this one would expand the tree cover and plant cover
and create some inlets and outlets based on a topography
of that particular parking area.
So surface water runoff could enter uphill of the structure,
be absorbed in the soils and by the plant materials
in the Green Stormwater Infrastructure.
And then any overflow could exit further down
a slope of the structure.
It creates shade, it creates an urban ecosystem,
and it treats stormwaters,
several important ecosystem services.
Another example from Williston showing you a corporate,
perhaps an industrial park, which would be changed.
So here we, again, take some of that grass area,
add some bump-outs with some bioswales
or some stormwater gardens.
And then again, add some trees in this open grassy area
to again, create shade and absorb nutrients and stormwater.
Here's the Bowlerama, which on a quiet day,
has a lot of empty parking places
and not much green infrastructure.
Well, you could improve that by planting some trees,
creating a riprap swale to absorb the stormwater
adjacent to the sidewalk
and let it filter through these engineered soils
into the existing plant material.
You've probably seen this when you hit a store
on an average day, but might only fill up
on the day after Thanksgiving.
Well, let's take some of those often unused parking spots
and create a bioswale adjacent to the parking areas
that are rarely used.
Again, it'll allow the stormwater to filter through
by gravity and be absorbed by trees
and plants adjacent to the parking lot.
And this one here shows a residential structure,
which has a lot of nice plants
and grass in front of the house.
But you'll see on the roof, there's no disconnect
between the roof runoff and the surrounding plants.
So what we would like to do here
is to ask the homeowner to install some gutters
with downspouts that connect to a rain garden
and let the water sink in to that plant material,
as opposed to running off onto the street directly.
I think this is one of the last ones,
a suburban street in Essex.
And this will give you a cross section
of what some of these structures may look like.
So, as I mentioned, there's a series of engineered soils
underneath these plant materials
that allows the water to run in to, be treated,
and then to dump into the existing storm store
once it's been treated
and the nutrients are mostly removed
by the plants and by the soil.
What did we learn from this?
Well, one of the big things, as I mentioned earlier,
is that maintenance of this is a concern.
They're not like your typical lawns
or grass that someone can just mow and walk away from.
They the plants need to be tended,
the soils may need to be replaced after a period of time.
And some towns are ready to do this,
and some towns are somewhat leery of that.
So it was important to show them what could be done
and maybe what some of their challenges would be.
The second part of this presentation
talks about rural environments.
So what we wanted to do here is to look at towns
across the watershed that may have had
some water quality impairments over time
and consider ways that some of these rural towns
could better manage their back roads
to help improve water quality
and the ecosystems around those roads.
So we looked at the towns
that had adverse water quality reports.
So we phased this in over a period of years.
So this shows that the 10 towns that we worked with
from 2017 to 2020, again, those towns are highlighted
on the map to the left.
So again, we produced a product for back roads,
roadside stewardship,
and this publication is available online
to all communities within the state of Vermont.
The elements that we looked at were,
how do we manage the vegetation width?
Look at historically significant trees,
look at insect and disease infestations,
the impact of mechanical damage,
agriculture and the different ages of forests.
These are some of the issues that we wanna consider
when we're looking at back roads stewardship.
Who manages those roads?
How do they prepare for insect infestations?
How do they mow and maintain these roads?
How do they remove water from the roads
at high flow events and things of that nature?
Here's an example of what folks
at Vermont Forest Parks and Rec put together.
They looked at the right of way,
which is illustrated in the top right.
The road width in the center,
the cleared right of way in the pink areas,
and then the vegetation width to the far left
and right of the roadway.
And they measured how wide those roadway widths were
in different parts.
In this case, in the town of Hyde Park, Vermont.
So the larger the circle
indicates the larger vegetation width.
And again, part of the manual that was produced
for these folks looked at how they could better deal
with that width which was in general, 49.5 feet.
The travel surface, the cleared zone,
and then the manage of vegetation beyond that.
And that gives you your plus or minus 50-foot width
with which to manage that road.
One of the things that we saw repeatedly
was tree health and mechanical damage.
No surprise in this part of the country,
we get a lot of snow
and we got a lot of snow plow operators
that have to remove that snow for public safety concerns.
And they oftentimes bump into these trees,
creating all kinds of mechanical damage.
So in this map, you'll see in Stowe, Vermont,
we looked at different parts of the town
where we had different degrees of damage
to trees along the roadways.
Again, more illustrations of how that roadway
was impacted by a mechanical damage over time
and how they could perhaps repair that damage.
Can they remove some of those damaged trees?
Can they better instruct their plow drivers
on how to deal with this?
We also find that increasingly,
agriculture and hedge rows may impact the roadside area.
So it's important to work
with the landowners that own those crop lands
to help them better manage their crop lands
alongside roadways.
We have Ash trees that are unfortunately succumbing
to the impacts of the emerald ash borer.
And we may have some hazard trees in these areas
that have to be removed.
Oftentimes, utilities impact these roadways
and the trees have to be removed
to improve the transport of electricity
or other utilities.
And we have different ages of forests
that have to be managed in some cases, different ways,
because oftentimes, a younger forest might succumb to wind
or rain events differently than a mature forest.
And all these impacts were outlined in this guide.
Invasive plants is another issue.
We have things like Japanese knotweed,
which is a horrendous invasive plant.
So to help folks manage that better,
we put together a phonology and a management calendar
of the most common roadside invasive plants in Vermont,
and gave them an idea of when they flower,
when they leaf out, when they seed,
and when's the best time to mow or in some cases,
treat with herbicides these invasive plants.
And this is just a survey
of East Montpelier showing folks in that town
where we found different species of invasives
across the community.
This roadside management
and mowing policy would hopefully help
some of these folks better understand
different ways to mow those right-of-ways.
And finally, the lessons learned.
There's a lot of different interests
on how to maintain these roads.
Every town has a little bit different capacity
to manage the roads.
Emerald ash borer affects different communities
in different ways.
And this technical guidance will hopefully help them
manage their trees in perpetuity
as we face these changing conditions.
Here's a link to some websites
where you can learn more about this project
or download these community guides
and a lot of the partners that were involved in this,
Vermont Parks and Rec and their invasives programs.
I think that's it.
- [Moderator] We have just a few minutes.
If anyone has questions for Karl,
you can put them in the chat or ask them directly.
We have question here,
thank you for the invasive plant phonology
for roadside maintenance guide.
That slide flew quickly.
Is there a time of year that is clearly best for treatment?
- [Karl] Well, that depends on the species.
Some plants have a very limited flowering period
followed by a longer seed period.
The basic idea is you wanna remove these plants
before they get to the seed stage.
And those seeds can be distributed
either mechanically by wind or rain or by biologically,
by birds and other animals.
So it's important to treat them prior to seed stage
so that those seeds don't proliferate
across the environment.
- [Moderator] Thanks, John.
And Karl, if you wanna elaborate on anything
that flew by quickly.
- [Karl] I guess I would encourage folks
to take a look at these guides
and work with your local communities
to transfer them to another city or another state
to see if folks in your communities might be interested
in improving their stormwater management.
So Vermont did a real good job and in select communities.
And I hope that that information
can be broadcast far and wide.
That's kinda why I wanted to produce this talk
to make folks aware of this and hopefully get it out
into the hands of other municipal road managers
across the region.
- [Moderator] We have Anika.
I heard about this project from the New York side
of the watershed.
Can you comment at all on working across state lines?
- [Karl] Well, I think this project
could be easily transferrable to New York.
Obviously, they share the same watershed
and the same Lake Champlain concerns that all of us do.
And I think it's a matter of taking the guide
and bringing it to a community on the New York side,
Department of Public Works or other staff person to say,
"This is what they're doing in Vermont.
Is there a way to use this type of infrastructure
here in New York?"
And maybe there's an opportunity
to use a landscape scale restoration grant
from the Forest Service to pull this off
across the boundary.
So look at your state's Forest Action Plan in New York
and see if there's a connection
to green forest infrastructure.
- [Moderator] We have a comment here,
Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Program,
can you share more background
and provide or mail printed copies of both guides?
- [Karl] Yeah, Joanne was the project lead on this,
especially in the rural component and she was terrific.
So follow up on Joanne's lead and use these tools.
- [Moderator] Well, thank you, Karl.
- [Karl] Thanks everybody.