New green infrastructure planning open-source tool available

Green Street in Jonesville. Credit: NOAA Digital Coast

The Mid-Atlantic Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (MARISA), a NOAA CAP/RISA team, principal investigators Jordan Fischbach, Debra Knopman, and Klaus Keller published a new tool to mainstream green infrastructure planning in the publication, “Rhodium-SWMM: An open-source tool for green infrastructure placement under deep uncertainty.” Green infrastructure measures are stormwater management practices that mimic natural hydrological processes that are used to mitigate negative impacts of urban development and climate change adaptation. While these practices are increasingly being used, there is a challenge to evaluate their effectiveness due to some deep uncertainties and require navigating tradeoffs between multiple objectives. Advanced decision-making tools and methods such as Robust Decision Making (RDM) and Many-Objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM) have been applied to green infrastructure sparingly, but there has still been a lack of open-source tools to support decision-makers.