Geology topics

Matthew J. Burns

Publications and source records attributed to Matthew J. Burns.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

USGS2025

Practical pathways for protecting headwater streams in urbanizing areas

Headwater streams are diverse ecosystems and important sources of water and dissolved and particulate resources to the downstream river network. However, across the world, they are rapidly being degraded or lost through human activities, particularly urban development. This degradation and loss have negative consequences for the structure and function of headwater streams, as well as downstream river networks. Despite long-held recognition of the ecological value of headwater streams and the impacts of their widespread loss, there remains a large gap between developing strategies and tangible action. To address this gap, we, a group of cross-disciplinary researchers and practitioners from multiple organizations and locations, developed a framework to guide strategic decision-making and a comprehensive set of structural and nonstructural tools that can be used to protect headwater streams in urbanizing areas where opportunities to protect waterway health are being considered by local waterway practitioners and the community. The framework was tested by applying it to 4 contrasting case studies of urbanization with different physiographic, policy, and legislative settings. Our evaluation showed that the framework provides a useful generic mechanism that can be used by policymakers, planners, and other stakeholders to diagnose the status of headwater stream protection in a variety of urban areas and to support structured stakeholder conversations about what is desirable, practical, and achievable for their context.

Freshwater Science↗

USGS2025

Quantifying the success of stormwater control measure networks using effective imperviousness

The deleterious effects of directly-connected impervious surfaces on urban streams have been widely recognized. To deal with these effects, the use of stormwater control measures that aim to disconnect impervious surfaces and prevent stormwater from reaching the stream has surged. However, we lack widespread use of consistent metrics that describe how effective these stormwater control measures are for mitigating the effects of untreated stormwater. Using total impervious area neglects the effect of stormwater control measures whereas directly-connected impervious area assumes that stormwater control measures perform perfectly. Comparing the success of stormwater control measures across many watersheds and cities will require use of consistent metrics of effective imperviousness, describing actual performance of stormwater control measures in reducing impervious areas hydraulically connected to the stream. This work applies two published approaches to quantify effective imperviousness, one that measures the frequency of downstream flow disturbances and another that computes parameters from a paired rainfall-runoff regression analysis. We apply these approaches in two settings: 1) two watersheds with new low impact development in Clarksburg, Maryland, USA and 2) five watersheds with stormwater retrofits in Melbourne, Australia. These methods gave largely similar results, with differences in effective imperviousness ranging from 1%-9%. Using these approaches in Clarksburg, the effective imperviousness for the treatment watersheds was 6–12%, whereas the total imperviousness was 33–44% and the directly-connected imperviousness was 0%. In Clarksburg, effective imperviousness better described stream hydrologic and biotic outcomes compared to either total imperviousness or directly-connected imperviousness. In Melbourne, effective imperviousness was a better metric for hydrologic and water quality changes that are likely to provide ecological benefits. In both cases, new development and retrofits, we demonstrate the utility of effective imperviousness metrics for predicting stream outcomes and how these metrics may be used to understand the success of stormwater control measure using a consistent metric.

PLOS Water↗

USGS2024

Concepts and evolution of urban hydrology.

Urbanization and climate change are exacerbating the flood risk and ecosystem degradation in urban catchments, with traditional stormwater management systems often overwhelmed. In this Review, we discuss changes in urban hydrology and approaches to stormwater management. Roughly 90% of rainfall on impervious surfaces and drainage infrastructure becomes run-off, enhancing rainfall export away from cities and leading to local water scarcity and downstream flooding and pollution. Projected increases in urban populations (68% in cities by 2050) and rainfall intensity (~12% in the 10-year and 50-year recurrence interval intensity, under 1.5 °C warming) will exacerbate these issues. Transforming stormwater systems is thus urgently needed, to mitigate flood risk and also to address community desires for environmental protection and enhanced water security. Opportunities include rain gardens and other nature-based stormwater control measures (which restore natural flows and offer other ecosystem services), smart sensor monitoring networks and real-time management (which sustain natural flow regimes, mitigate flood risk and protect ecosystem services) and stormwater harvesting (to avoid local water scarcity). Community acceptance of stormwater harvesting is as high as 96% and stormwater is a substantial resource, with volumes often exceeding demand in some parts of the world. Delivering additional transformations globally requires research into strategies to incentivize engagement and investment, and policies to guide governance of decentralized networks.

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment↗

USGS2022

Closing the gap on wicked urban stream restoration problems: A framework to integrate science and community values

Restoring the health of urban streams has many of the characteristics of a wicked problem. Addressing a wicked problem requires managers, academics, practitioners, and community members to make negotiated tradeoffs and compromises to satisfy the values and perspectives of diverse stakeholders involved in setting restoration project goals and objectives. We conducted a gap analysis on 11 urban stream restoration projects to identify disconnections, underperformance issues, and missing processes in the project structures used to develop restoration project goals and objectives. We examined the gap analysis results to investigate whether managers appropriately identified problem statements and met stated objectives. Projects that aimed to restore overall stream health commonly fell short for various reasons, including limited stakeholder and community input and buy-in, revealing potential limitations in the breadth of objectives, values, and stakeholder perspectives and knowledge types. Projects that emphasized integrating community values and diverse knowledge types tended to meet the expected outcomes of restoring stream processes through incremental solutions. Managers implementing more holistic solutions and values-driven approaches are more likely to consider diverse viewpoints from a variety of community local institutions. Based on these and other results, we propose a conceptual framework that integrates diverse perspectives and knowledge to enhance social and ecological outcomes of urban stream restoration. The framework also emphasizes the importance of setting objectives that support incremental solutions to foster more realistic expectations amongst stakeholders.

Freshwater Science↗

USGS2016

Will it rise or will it fall? Managing the complex effects of urbanization on base flow

Sustaining natural levels of base flow is critical to maintaining ecological function as stream catchments are urbanized. Research shows a variable response of stream base flow to urbanization, with base flow or water tables rising in some locations, falling in others, or elsewhere remaining constant. The variable baseflow response is due to the array of natural (e.g., physiographic setting and climate) and anthropogenic (e.g., urban development and infrastructure) factors that influence hydrology. Perhaps as a consequence of this complexity, few simple tools exist to assist managers to predict baseflow change in their local urban area. This paper addresses this management need by presenting a decision support tool. The tool considers the natural vulnerability of the landscape, together with aspects of urban development in predicting the likelihood and direction of baseflow change. Where the tool identifies a likely increase or decrease it guides managers toward strategies that can reduce or increase groundwater recharge, respectively. Where the tool finds an equivocal result, it suggests a detailed water balance be performed. The decision support tool is embedded within an adaptive-management framework that encourages managers to define their ecological objectives, assess the vulnerability of their ecological objectives to changes in water table height, and monitor baseflow responses to urbanization. We trial our framework using two very different case studies: Perth, Western Australia, and Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Together, these studies show how pre-development water table height, climate and geology together with aspects of urban infrastructure (e.g., stormwater practices, leaky pipes) interact such that urbanization has overall led to rising base flow (Perth) and falling base flow (Baltimore). Greater consideration of subsurface components of the water cycle will help to protect and restore the ecology of urban freshwaters.

Maryland, Western Australia↗

USGS2016

Principles for urban stormwater management to protect stream ecosystems

Urban stormwater runoff is a critical source of degradation to stream ecosystems globally. Despite broad appreciation by stream ecologists of negative effects of stormwater runoff, stormwater management objectives still typically center on flood and pollution mitigation without an explicit focus on altered hydrology. Resulting management approaches are unlikely to protect the ecological structure and function of streams adequately. We present critical elements of stormwater management necessary for protecting stream ecosystems through 5 principles intended to be broadly applicable to all urban landscapes that drain to a receiving stream: 1) the ecosystems to be protected and a target ecological state should be explicitly identified; 2) the postdevelopment balance of evapotranspiration, stream flow, and infiltration should mimic the predevelopment balance, which typically requires keeping significant runoff volume from reaching the stream; 3) stormwater control measures (SCMs) should deliver flow regimes that mimic the predevelopment regime in quality and quantity; 4) SCMs should have capacity to store rain events for all storms that would not have produced widespread surface runoff in a predevelopment state, thereby avoiding increased frequency of disturbance to biota; and 5) SCMs should be applied to all impervious surfaces in the catchment of the target stream. These principles present a range of technical and social challenges. Existing infrastructural, institutional, or governance contexts often prevent application of the principles to the degree necessary to achieve effective protection or restoration, but significant potential exists for multiple co-benefits from SCM technologies (e.g., water supply and climate-change adaptation) that may remove barriers to implementation. Our set of ideal principles for stream protection is intended as a guide for innovators who seek to develop new approaches to stormwater management rather than accept seemingly insurmountable historical constraints, which guarantee future, ongoing degradation.

Freshwater Science↗