Charlotte’s New Stream Restoration Ranking Tool
Jason Hunt, PE
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services
Charlotte, NC
Christine Blackwelder
Wildlands Engineering
Charlotte, NC
Authors: Hunt, Jason and Blackwelder, Christine
In 2023, Wildlands Engineering completed the development of a new stream restoration ranking tool for the City of Charlotte. Historically, stream restoration has been done by the city in the context of Charlotte’s Stream and Wetland Umbrella Mitigation Bank. These past restoration efforts have focused on streams identified through a ranking effort completed in 2008 which resulted in a list of the top 20 restoration candidate projects citywide. Since 2008, some of these streams have been restored and others were determined to no longer be good candidates for restoration. Since this time, the city has also begun to consider stream restoration in the context of watershed planning, water quality, and ecological uplift above and beyond the mitigation bank context. With nearly 3,000 miles of streams in its jurisdiction and the completion of several of the previously identified restoration projects, the city contracted with Wildlands to develop a new stream restoration ranking tool to identify future restoration candidates to address both mitigation and watershed planning priorities while incorporating lessons learned from past restoration. The Excel and GIS-based tool was developed collaboratively to take into consideration the city’s priorities and needs and the best available data. The result is a highly customizable tool that enables the city to rank and re-rank stream reaches based on multiple feasibility and degradation metrics and land ownership considerations. This presentation will include a demonstration of the new stream ranking tool, a discussion of the decisions made about the criteria incorporated into the tool, and an illustration of how the tool has been used by the city to identify and select future restoration priorities.
About Jason Hunt, PE
Jason Hunt, P.E. is a Water Quality Planner with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services. He is responsible for developing watershed restoration plans and strategies for reducing surface water pollution from storm water runoff in the City of Charlotte. He has 20 years of experience in the field of watershed protection and surface water quality improvement, including 7 years with the City of Philadelphia’s Source Water Protection Program in the Office of Watersheds and the Planning & Research Division’s Wastewater Treatment Group. Hunt has a BS in Civil Engineering from Drexel University and a MS in Water Resources and Environmental Engineering from Villanova University.
About Christine Blackwelder
Ms. Blackwelder currently serves as Senior Environmental Scientist for Wildlands Engineering. She has spent her 20+ year career assessing, designing, and managing construction of stream restoration projects. As a technical leader for Wildlands, she is involved with all stages of project development, from initial concept to existing conditions assessment, through design, mitigation plan development, construction document development, construction management, and analysis of annual monitoring data.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christineblackwelder/