October 2021 was an exciting month for UrbanBEATS’ research team with the International Conference on Urban Drainage 2021 Virtual Meeting. We had a total of four oral presentations on various ongoing research projects around the UrbanBEATS Planning-Support System and one oral presentation on the adaptation of the SSANTO Planning-Support System in Trois-Rivières, Canada.
Key Highlights – the Future Water Project
Two talk, in particular, by Baiqian (Luke) Shi and Dr Veljko Prodanovic on the work undertaken in the Future Water Project were nominated as finalists for the prestigious Poul Harremoës award. The Future Water Project is in its wrap-up stages after several years of intense activities in trying to map future urban stormwater quality across catchments and adapting UrbanBEATS to provide support to planners and regulators in this regard.
Baiqian Shi’s talk investigated a novel approach to acquiring fine-scale water quality information in urban catchments, in particular, detecting illicit discharges, which many modelling errors could frequently be attributed to. His ‘sensor army’ provides useful insights and much promise as a cost-effective management and data collection solution. Further to this talk, Baiqian has also recently submitted his PhD Thesis for examination. Congratulations on this big milestone!!
Dr Veljko Prodanovic followed this up with how some of this data and ongoing model developments have enabled him to calibrate and develop a spatial model for simulating Future Urban Stormwater Quality.
For anyone interested in reading more about the Future Water Project, stay tuned for upcoming journal publications on the project and download the Summary Report as of July 2021:
- Prodanovic, V., Bach, P. M., Shi, B., McCarthy, D. T., Metzeling, L., Coleman, R., Carvalho, C., Jamali, B., Kuller, M., Zhang, K., Lintern, A., Grant, T., Leahy, P., LeRay S., Gerente, D., Deletic, A. (2021) Future Water: Understanding future urban water quality for improving present strategies. ARC Linkage Summary Report July 2021. [Link]
Other presentations at the conference
In addition to the Future Water Project, three other talks of note included one by myself on ongoing work with multi-functional Blue Green Spaces. This touches upon several projects including CONNECT-HDL, which is transitioning into its next continuation project (more details coming soon).
Natalia Duque Villarreal also presented her ongoing work based on UrbanBEATS to generate sanitation systems. She has recently published a journal paper on this, which will be open access and can be found here. Her talk at the conference was titled: A simplified spatial representation and dimensioning of sewer systems for transitions planning
And last, but not least, SSANTO was also featured at the conference with Sandrine Lacroix presenting some insights on how the tool was adapted to the Canadian context and the next steps in its development. Her talk was titled: Adaptation of a spatial multicriteria analysis tool for decision support on green stormwater infrastructure siting: from an Australian to Canadian urban context. SSANTO is being further developed within the MOVE-NBS Project, led by Martijn Kuller.
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