Watershed Texas

A scene from Cup and Saucer wetlands in Canterbury, NSW, Australia. Source: Sydney Water

Many of us are visual learners, and video-sharing sites like YouTube come to the rescue when we want to gain an understanding of something new and uncommon. That goes for learning about stormwater wetlands too—although good videos portraying them are few and far between. Stormwater wetlands don’t do hilarious tricks or say cute things, and at least for now, they aren’t abundant subjects for filming. However, the key to familiarizing people with their benefits—water quality improvements, habitat, and flood control, among others—is having good examples to which we can refer. Until there are ample stormwater wetland demonstration projects in the Galveston Bay Area, we can rely on “distance learning” through articles, photos, and now, video.

I had a look and curated a few videos to give you the idea of how a stormwater wetland appears.

First, let’s go to a project in Australia, in the Cooks River watershed at Canterbury near Sydney. The first part of the video gives you an idea of the many entities that may be involved in project like this, the design principles, and an overview of the importance of stormwater wetlands. It really picks up at 9:40 with a time lapse sequence of the construction from the first shovel load to the glory of a wetland full of established plants.

Click the image for the video on the Cup and Saucer stormwater wetland. Source: Sydney Water

If you have less than 2 minutes remaining to check out stormwater wetlands, see this video shot from a balloon over the Arlington Stormwater Wetlands Park in Washington State.  From above, you do not see open water but you do see a winding dark green ribbon of vegetation where the wetland is deepest. This is a good demonstration of the importance of vegetation, rather than large areas of open water, in a treatment wetland. Also notice that park amenities have been incorporated into the site to make it good habitat for humans, too.

Click the image for video on the Arlington Stormwater Wetland Park. Source: Bill Gillam

Finally, here’s a stormwater wetland in New Bern, North Carolina. It’s a young wetland just establishing, and includes more filamentous algae than one would see in a mature wetland. It looks like a great project, but the best part about this video just might be the reporter’s snappy red wading boots.

Click the image for video on the New Bern stormwater wetland. Source: WCTI News Channel 12

TCWP will be making videos of our latest stormwater wetland projects, so stay tuned for more in 2014.