The continued development of urban areas in recent decades has caused multiple issues affecting the sustainability of urban drainage systems. The increase of impervious surface areas in urban regions alters watershed hydrology and water quality. Typical impacts to downstream hydrologic regimes include higher peak flows and runoff volumes, shorter lag times, and reduced infiltration and base flow. Urban runoff increases the transport of pollutants and nutrients and thus degrades water bodies downstream from urban areas. One of the most frequently used practices to mitigate these impacts is bioretention. Despite its widespread use, research on bioretention systems remains active, particularly in terms of mix design and nitrogen treatment. Recent research focusing on bioretention is reviewed herein. The use of mesocosms provides the ability to isolate particular treatment processes and replicate variability. Computational models have been adapted and applied to simulate bioretention, offering potential improvements to their operation, maintenance, and design. Maintenance practices are important for sustained operation and have also been reviewed. Predicting maintenance is essential to assessing lifecycle costs. Within these research areas, gaps are explored, and recommendations made for future work.

Rainwater harvesting (RWH) is a decentralized practice that provides both water supply and runoff reduction benefits that are often difficult to assess. To assist in this evaluation, a model was developed that simulates a single RWH system in Richmond, Virginia, using storage volume, roof area, irrigated area, an indoor nonpotable demand, and a storage dewatering goal as independent design variables. Water supply and runoff capture reliability are assessed for a wide variety of cases. Tradeoff curves were developed to evaluate the design variable substitution when reliability was held constant. A reliability function was fit to the simulation results, and a solution method was developed to solve for an unknown variable as a function of the others. This method evaluates different design cases that provide the same water supply and/or runoff reliability, demonstrating that the design variables can be substituted for each other, using care to restrict substitutions between functional inputs or (separ...

Industrial efficiency is important for the development of regional economic policies. Based on a network data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology which considered undesirable outputs and links b...