Shifts of Resilience and Recovery of Aquatic Metabolism in Stormwater Green Infrastructure

This research showed the effectiveness of aquatic metabolism as a proxy indicator of urban stormwater green infrastructure (SGI) performance, and how resilience and recovery of metabolism shift during storm events. Sensor-based dissolved oxygen (DO) data from an SGI in Western Australia during fourteen storm events over two years period were used to develop metabolism metric. The SGI showed positive and negative metabolism depending on stormwater flow, DO level and time of the events. Water level, water volume, hydraulic retention time, inflow rate, antecedent dry days, etc. were some major factors to determine the recovery and resilience of metabolism during the storm perturbation. The system showed metabolism resistivity during small events or event that took place during the frequent rainfall time that made SGI lotic. The SGI recovered metabolism quickly during the less frequent rainfall event, particularly during the summer when SGI became lentic. The strong correlation between positive metabolism and nutrient attenuation indicating metabolism’s applicability to assess SGI performance in absence of routine water sampling.