Building Holistic Urban Stream Ecosystems Using People, Bugs, Slime, Fish and Concrete

Urban streams are recognized as functional ecosystems more and more (folks used to think of them as “dead” way too often.)  While they certainly have their issues, there is a lot of biology and ecology going on in and around them.  For example, there is often a stream under the stream that you see.  Where the groundwater meets stream water, there can be a vibrant ecosystem with an array of different critters and microbes living in the porous spaces of the underworld.  They clean the stream and use the subsurface as refuges for the young organisms to avoid being eaten.

This Hyporheic zone is just one of many building blocks of stream ecosystems that can be adapted to urbanized streams to create more healthy stream ecosystems, even with all that concrete.  We’ll learn how this can be done in more of a bioengineering sense to make these ecosystems an asset for communities of people.