rivEAU

The key objective of this project was to develop a stormwater management system that improves the health of urban river ecosystems to provide citizens with access to healthy urban rivers and riverbanks for a variety of recreational activities. So far, stormwater management in cities has mainly been focused on minimising flooding risks. The stormwater management this project focuses on goes beyond this. The aim was to develop a management of stormwaters that reduces the impact on the river itself by minimising the stormwater-induced stress on the physicochemical and biological/ecological water quality and on the river’s morphology and habitats via increased shear stress. Summarized, the project focused on the "eco-hydraulics" of the river system as a multi-objective goal for stormwater management at urban river scale. To develop such stormwater management system described, the following specific objectives needed to be pursued:

• Develop a multi-objective function expressing the eco-hydraulic quality of the urban river;
• Model stormwater systems; in particular: increase insight in and obtain a mathematical model of stormwater pond behaviour in terms of water quality variables;
• Develop a flexible stormwater management system using real-time control that is based on rules that are extracted from integrated modelling studies;
• Make the stormwater management system robust against uncertainties in rainfall forecasts.