Jan 18, 2019

Municipalities across the state and beyond are carefully planning and implementing green infrastructure in their developed landscape to restore key aspects of the natural water cycle. Green infrastructure helps to achieve stormwater attenuation and contaminant filtration by increasing the pervious surfaces in often sophisticated ways. Additionally, green infrastructure features, as city dwellers have come to realize, demonstrate multiple benefits in addition to improving surface porosity, such as peak, volume, and load reductions, urban heat island mitigation, traffic calming, carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, natural aesthetics, and others. The benefits are substantial, but so are the potential costs. GreenPlan-IT helps planners to make smart decisions in the types and locations of green infrastructure, minimizing effort and cost while maximizing the effectiveness of the public and private investments.

In January 2019, GreenPlan-IT Tracker was released to the public. GreenPlan-IT Tracker complements the other components of the GreenPlan-IT toolset, a modular resource for municipalities seeking to plan for, optimize, and track their Green Infrastructure (GI). Unlike the other modules, however, the new GreenPlan-IT Tracker attends to the already-installed features, rather than prospective and planning-level work associated with Green Infrastructure. Accordingly, the Tracker tool handles the accounting of GI across the landscape, recording the characteristics of those installations, the geospatial details, and calculating the effect of those features on stormwater flow attenuation and filtration.

Why would people use GreenPlan-IT Tracker? The tool is designed to track locations, treated pollutant mass, maintenance needs, and report spatial and cumulative outcomes of GI implementation for annual reports over years and decades. Rather than recording this information in a general purpose geodatabase -- as is the current convention among most Bay Area cities -- this tool saves its users time while also offering deeper insight into the locations, specifications, and effectiveness of their ever-growing portfolio of green stormwater infrastructure. Because it was developed using a highly versatile and flexible interface, the tool can be tailored to meet the needs of individual cities while also leveraging features common to all. It is easy to use and provides ready export capability so that users can readily take their data to go whenever they’d like.

Programs and Focus Areas: 
Clean Water Program
Environmental Informatics Program