Environmental Modelling and Software 111 (2019) 121–133 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Environmental Modelling & Software journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envsoft Development of a participatory Green Infrastructure design, visualization T and evaluation system in a cloud supported jupyter notebook computing environment ! Lorne Leonarda, , Brian Milesb, Bardia Heidaric, Laurence Lind, Anthony M. Castronovae, f g d h Barbara Minsker , Jong Lee , Charles Scaife , Lawrence E. Band a Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Institutes of Energy and the Environment, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA b Brian Miles, CGI Group Inc., Lafayette, LA, USA c Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA d Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, Virginia, USA e Consortium for the Advancement of Hydrological Science, Cambridge, MA, USA f Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA g National Center for Supercomputing Applications, The University of Illinois Champaign, Urbana, IL USA h Department of Environmental Sciences, Department of Engineering Systems and Environment, University of Virginia, Virginia, USA T ABSTRACT Land use planners, landscape architects, and water resource managers are using Green Infrastructure (GI) designs in urban environments to promote ecosystem services including mitigation of storm water ! ooding and water quality degradation. An expanded set of urban sustainability goals also includes increasing carbon sequestration, songbird habitat, reducing urban heat island e"ects, and improvement of landscape aesthetics. GI is conceptualized to improve water and ecosystem quality by reducing storm water runo " at the source, but when properly designed, may also bene#t these expanded goals. With the increasing use of GI in urban contexts, there is an emerging need to facilitate participatory design and scenario evaluation to enable better communication between GI designers and groups impacted by these designs. Major barriers to this type of public participation is the complexity of both parameterizing, operating, visualizing and interpreting results of complex ecohydrological models at various watershed scales that are su$cient to address diverse ecosystem service goals. This paper demonstrates a set of work!ows to facilitate rapid and repeatable creation of GI landscape designs which are incorporated into complex models using web applications and services. For this project, we use the RHESSys (Regional Hydro-Ecologic Simulation System) ecohydrologic model to evaluate participatory GI landscape designs generated by stakeholders and decision makers, but note that the work!ow could be adapted to a set of other watershed models. 1. Introduction engineered) and management of their own property or neighborhood. Therefore, environmental modeling software should be designed to A growing paradigm in urban environmental management is the address the strongly integrated set of ecosystem services a" ected by adaptation and enhancement of ecosystem services with Green urban form and infrastructure, and engage individuals and commu- Infrastructure (GI) to mitigate the e"ects of urbanization on stormwater nities about their own role in improving water quality and mitigating !ooding and water quality degradation, urban heat islands, air quality extreme events at the parcel to watershed scales. A major management and other adverse impacts. As hydrological and ecosystem models barrier is the complexity of installing, compiling, and consuming da- evolve to explicitly represent the in!uence of #ne scale landscape form tasets with watershed models using su$cient spatial resolution and on the cycling and export of water, carbon and nutrients, public per- process representation of the #ne scale ecohydrological interactions of ceptions and preferences need to be included in the management pro- landscape design and structure. The conventional process by many cess by which water resource managers and landscape planners design hydrological modelers is to prepare data as an o%ine process from and implement new urban design and infrastructure. Often the public is multiple sources, copy the processed datasets to the compute environ- not contemplating the important interaction between the water cycle ment for modeling, then process the watershed model results o%ine and ecosystem processes, with the design form (architecture and with calibration and visualization. These processes are cumbersome ! Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] , [email protected] (L. Leonard), [email protected] (B. Miles), [email protected] (B. Heidari), [email protected] (L. Lin), [email protected] (A.M. Castronova), [email protected] (B. Minsker), [email protected] (J. Lee), [email protected] (C. Scaife), [email protected] (L.E. Band). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2018.10.003 Received 30 July 2017; Received in revised form 2 September 2018; Accepted 8 October 2018 Available online 13 October 2018 1364-8152/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. L. Leonard et al. Environmental Modelling and Software 111 (2019) 121–133 We developed a new GI web application to allow web-users to de- Software availability • sign GI with a plan and street view perspective. Users can assign custom GI attributes for their modeling requirements and estimate Name GI Designer, RHESSys notebooks. costs to share with other professionals and the public. Software Required Internet browser with HTML 5 support. Later New GI-model-data work!ows (GI-RHESSys-HydroTerre) were cre- versions are recommended. • ated to process the GI landscape designs from the GI web application Program Languages Python, JavaScript, HTML, C. into #ne spatial resolution model parameter #les. These new Availability and cost The notebooks are available from GitHub: work!ows integrate the RHESSys ecohydrological model and the https://github.com/leonard-psu/RHESSys-Jupyter- HydroTerre expert system to integrate GI data bundles with local notebooks to use in any Jupyter compute environment. custom spatial datasets (e.g. terrain, soils, land cover) supplied by To use the Jupyter notebooks with HydroShare, an ac- the user or existing HydroTerre national spatial data (United States). count is required that is free. The notebooks are avail- We demonstrate using a new GI-RHESSys Jupyter notebook that able by using HydroShare's discover search engine. The • uses the GI web application to create GI landscape designs. These Green Infrastructure (GI) notebook presented in this designs are processed using the GI-RHESSys-HydroTerre data manuscript is available here: Leonard, L., L. Band, L. work!ows and then processed within the GI-RHESSys Jupyter no- Lin, B. Miles (2018). Green Infrastructure Designer with tebook. The GI-RHESSys Jupyter notebook uses the existing RHESSys Work!ow, HydroShare, https://doi.org/10. EcoHydroLib and RHESSys work !ows to prepare data and execute 4211/hs.3f7680cf83dc426e858d5b48cb95a565 . the RHESSys ecohydrological model using the user's GI landscape The GI web application is here https://hydroterremodels.psu. designs. These notebooks serve to facilitate participatory use and edu/RHESSYS/GI_Designer/GI.html . EcoHydroLib is evaluation of GI planning. available from https://github.com/selimnairb/ EcohydroLib and RHESSysWork!ows from https:// This article is structured with Section 2 summarizing background github.com/selimnairb/RHESSysWork!ows. information and the inspiration to combine GI with RHESSys and • work!ows using a Jupyter notebook. Section 3 discusses the back-end web application design using multiple work ! ows. Section 4, describes and make it di$cult for other professionals and the public to participate and demonstrates the GI web application for modelers to create GI in improving the modeling process and critiquing watershed model landscape designs. Finally, Section 5 demonstrates using the web ap- results. The research presented in this manuscript is a step towards • plication within Jupyter notebooks to develop a new RHESSys ecohy- improving these processes, by using work!ows to make data and model drological model. processes more e$cient to evaluate watershed model results and en- gage other professionals and the public with GI landscape designs to 2. Background evaluate their impact to ecohydrological interactions. The premise of this paper has two components, conceptualized to 2.1. The role and requirements for Green Infrastructure (GI) facilitate participatory design and evaluation of GI planning. The par- ticipatory design assumes that stormwater engineers, community • The motivation for GI in urban areas is to manage and protect the groups and potentially individual residents would collaborate in the water cycle without relying solely on conventional engineered solutions design of preferred GI, with rapid evaluation of di"erent design e"ec- (i.e. dams, levees, detention ponds). Here we operationally de #ne GI to tiveness for reaching stormwater restoration goals. The !rst component include various forms of soil, vegetation, and water storage treatments, is to engage and connect storm water engineers and property owners including tree canopy, rain gardens, bioswales, permeable pavement with rapid charrettes of applying GI landscape designs on their property that promote processes mimicking natural in #ltration, transpiration, using web-based visualizations.