Building SWAMP’s in Coastal Oregon Communities

Oregon

With development and impervious surface on the rise, Oregon’s coastal communities are discovering that many of their streams and bays are impaired by stormwater runoff. While the metropolitan areas of Oregon are addressing this problem through low impact development stormwater practices that balance growth with natural resource protection, the rural coastal communities are struggling to overcome education and capacity gaps.

With a grant from CICEET, this project team is packaging the lessons learned in urban Oregon to create SWAMP, an open source stormwater assessment and management decision support process that rural communities can use to make informed decisions related to land use and stormwater management.

Investigators are modifying existing and successfully applied modeling strategies from the Portland metro region to meet the particular parameters of coastal communities. The team is partnering with the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR), the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, the National Non-point Education for Municipal Officials (NEMO) network, and others to combine education and training programs with an easy to use, online interface for evaluating and designing stormwater BMPs at the parcel and watershed scale.