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Richard Boase

    BRING SCIENCE INTO LOCAL GOVERNMENT: “Over the years, we worked on a whole range of things which were innovative. Without the participation by someone like Richard Boase, I doubt we could have done it,” stated Dr. Hans Schreier, Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Land and Water Systems at the University of British Columbia


    “Municipalities have limited access to science and they do not have time to do the science. So, why not use the students? Not only is it a benefit to community leaders, the students benefit because they are doing something that makes a difference. And so, connecting with Richard Boase in the 1990s was really fundamental because he is on the inside. Richard identified projects where the students could benefit directly and make a difference. To me, that was the opportunity,” stated Hans Schreier.

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    DESIGN WITH NATURE: “We must do a better job of protecting streams. We are talking about a change in attitude so that communities would view natural systems and water differently. We can turn the situation around,” stated Richard Boase, career environmental champion within local government in the Metro Vancouver region


    “We knew more than 20 years ago what we needed to do when designing residential communities, but local governments generally failed to act. Turning the situation around is SIMPLE when you understand hydrology. And when you understand the kinds of changes needed in development practices, and the differences they would make, property to neighhourhood to watershed. We are saying there is a way of designing communities and making decisions differently so that you can be restorative in nature within the urban development context,” stated Richard Boase.

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    DESIGN WITH NATURE TO RESTORE STREAM HEALTH: “Streams need a place to be. If we cannot get our heads around that, we are not going to keep our streams,” stated Tim Pringle, Chair of the Ecological Accounting Process Initiative


    “Because nature is a system, you cannot slice and dice it. EAP, the Ecological Accounting Process, recognizes this and is a financial tool to give streams the support they need to survive in the local government setting. EAP provides a value picture of a stream system as a land use. The Riparian Areas Protection Regulation enables this approach. The foundational ideas behind what we advocate are IMPLEMENTATION and RESPONSIBILITY. And there is a third idea named OPPORTUNITY,” stated Tim Pringle.

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    FLASHBACK TO 2012: “Given the huge knowledge bases that the sciences have built up around the hydrology of urban watersheds, it can come as a surprise when we realize how little is known about some of the basics. The urban tree canopy is an example,” stated (the late) Dr. Charles Rowney, Scientific Authority, when the Partnership for Water Sustainability announced the addition of a Tree Canopy Module to the Water Balance Model


    “Tree canopy interception of rainfall is a technical area where the fundamentals are well understood, but the empirical basis, the availability of actual observations, is still in its infancy. When it comes to the urban canopy, we just don’t have a lot to go on. Considering the importance of urban trees, we’re not sure why this knowledge gap has persisted. But when we began our research, it quickly became clear that there is a lot to learn about some of things that are important in dealing with the tree canopy. And it became just as clear that we had to improve the science,” stated the late Dr. Charles Rowney.

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    URBAN TREES AS A RAINWATER MANAGEMENT TOOL: “We found that individually planted trees capture, store and release stormwater back into the atmosphere—a process called transpiration—at a rate three times that of trees in a forest,” stated doctoral candidate Sarah Ponte, Department of Environmental Science and Technology at the University of Maryland (November 2021)


    “We explored how trees function in different urban contexts, from streets to small patches of forest. This is knowledge that can help support the management of green infrastructure,” stated Sarah Ponte. “Understanding how different management contexts affect urban ecohydrologic fluxes, such as transpiration, can aid the development of policy on the application and effectiveness of urban tree canopy as a tool for stormwater runoff reduction at watershed and city scales,”

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