How Trees and Soil Improve Water Quality

This blog has been reposted from Deeproot by blogger Nathalie Shanstrom. To read more of their blog posts, click the link below:

http://www.deeproot.com/blog/blog-entries/how-trees-and-soil-improve-water-quality

We write a lot about the benefits that trees and soils have on water quality. But what, exactly, do they improve? Back in 2011, landscape Nathalie Shanstrom tackled this topic, explaining in easy-to-understand terms what we mean by when we refer to water quality improvements. While seriously impaired runoff is not a concern on most sites, trees and soils remain one of the most efficient and most safe methods from removing common pollutants. In fact, in some cases trees benefit from the stormwater: “Not only has vegetation been shown to significantly improve nutrient removal, trees also seem to benefit from the nutrients in the stormwater, as a study that compared growth of trees irrigated with stormwater to trees irrigation with tapwater found that the trees irrigated with stormwater had greater height growth and root density compared with those irrigated with tap water.” Reprinted here is Nathalie’s post. Enjoy. -LM

It’s hard to tell just by looking at a tree-lined street, but soil and its microbes, in combination with trees, work together as a powerful system to improve the quality of stormwater that is filtered through it. Some pollutants are held or filtered by soil, others are taken up or transformed by plants or microbes, and still others are first held by soil and then taken up by vegetation or degraded by bacteria, “recharging” the soil’s sorption capacity in between rain events.

This table summarizes some of the main bioretention pollutant cleansing mechanisms.

Several recent literature reviews of lab and field studies of bioretention pollutant removal have concluded that bioretention systems have the potential to be one of the most effective BMP’s for pollutant removal. High concentration and load reductions are consistently found for suspended solids, metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), and other organic compounds. Nutrient (dissolved nitrogen and phosphorus) removal has been more variable. Healthy vegetation has been found to be especially crucial for removal of dissolved nitrogen and phosphorus.

Similarly, several studies that have compared vegetated media to unvegetated media have found that the presence of vegetation substantially improves TP and TN retention, as vegetated media is much more effective  than unvegetated media at removing PO4 from solution and preventing NO3 leaching from media (e.g. Henderson et al 2007, Lucas and Greenway 2007a, 2007b, 2008, May et al 2006). Not only has vegetation been shown to significantly improve nutrient removal, trees also seem to benefit from the nutrients in the stormwater, as a study that compared growth of trees irrigated with stormwater to trees irrigation with tapwater found that the trees irrigated with stormwater had greater height growth and root density compared with those irrigated with tap water (May et al 2006).

For a summary of some of the research on bioretention and water quality, see Davis et al 2010, Davis et al 2009, Table 1.1 in Henderson 2008, and the BMP database.

For more on how vegetation improves bioretention nutrient removal, see (for example) Henderson et al 2007, Lucas and Greenway 2007a, 2007b, 2008, May et al 2006.

In addition to beautifying streets and generally making people happier, street trees growing in large soil volumes are capable of providing significant stormwater quality benefits. That is why you may have heard them described on this blog and elsewhere as green infrastructure. Stormwater pipes alone, by contrast, do not provide any stormwater quality benefits. For this reason, installing bigger pipes is not always the best solution for addressing non-point source pollution and flooding problems in cities.

Nathalie Shanstrom is a landscape architect with The Kestrel Design Group.