UF team wins EPA's first Campus RainWorks Challenge

April 22, 2013

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today announced the University of Florida as the first-place winner of the inaugural Campus RainWorks Challenge in the large institution category.

The challenge, which had submissions from 218 teams, was created to inspire the next generation of landscape architects, planners and engineers to develop innovative green infrastructure systems that reduce stormwater pollution and support sustainable communities.

The UF team brought together 12 students in landscape architecture, environmental engineering, and agricultural and biological engineering.

The team’s goal was to raise awareness of and heighten the relationship between humans and water by creating a “journey of water” that represents the movement, processes and properties of stormwater as it falls, flows and eventually spills into Lake Alice on the UF campus. The project site starts in a popular and well-traveled part of campus, the Reitz Student Union North Lawn.

“From the beginning of this studio to the submission of our work to the EPA, the class conducted this project as a cross-discipline team effort. We organized as an office with a project manager and worked tirelessly to produce the various submittal products,” said Glenn Acomb, landscape architecture senior lecturer and faculty adviser.

The master plan includes four points of roof-top stormwater collection, each feeding into either rain gardens or bioswales – depressional areas of vegetation created to allow pollution and silt to settle out of the water flowing through them. Three water bodies receive this water that flows to Lake Alice and eventually the Floridan Aquifer. The team’s design visually demonstrates the “journey of stormwater” and the relationship between humans and water with every decision.

“This project offered our studio a really unique opportunity – we were able to collaborate with students and professors from other departments, talk to the student body and get their input, and design a stormwater solution for a place we all know and love,” said landscape architecture senior Emily Sturm, who served as the team’s project manager.

The UF team members also include landscape architecture students Jabari Taylor, Brenda Lugano, Tracy Wyman, Jayne Branstrom, Hannah Plate, Gregory Ford and Josh Evitt, environmental engineering student Tracy Fanara and agricultural and biological engineering students Wesley Henson, Angelica Engel and Natalie Nelson.

The Campus RainWorks Challenge engages students and faculty at the nation’s colleges and universities, teaching green infrastructure principles and design, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and increasing the use of green infrastructure on college and university campuses.

The submissions were reviewed by more than 30 expert judges from EPA, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Water Environment Federation and the American Society of Civil Engineers. The winning teams were selected based on six criteria: analysis and planning; preservation or restoration of natural features; integrated water management; soil and vegetation management; value to campus; and likelihood of implementation.