Aggie B.L.U.E. Print Laboratories: Building Lasting University Environments-a Multi-Disciplinary Teaching Opportunity

Planning strategies emphasizing stormwater management, such as Low Impact Development (LID), are increasingly utilized in sustainable design/development, minimizing the impact of impervious land cover. LID is an innovative approach treating stormwater at the source, using uniformly distributed facilities such as stormwater collection devices, filtering systems, and water reuse mechanisms. This project seeks to educate and train students in LID alternatives to traditional stormwater management through hands-on outdoor classroom activities involving development, installation, monitoring, management, and evaluation of stormwater management designs within interactive test plots. Two sites on the Texas A&M University campus are being developed, one in which the primary challenge is runoff from building roofs and the other entails management of a large parking lot and turfgrass area effluent. Tasks are being carried out by students across three colleges (agriculture, architecture and engineering), including the Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Horticultural Sciences, Civil Engineering, and Biological and Agricultural Engineering departments. Provisions for solutions to complex hydrologic issues are being explored, assessed, and showcased as outdoor labs and interactive public exhibitions. Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning students are providing the designs, Horticultural Sciences students are providing plant materials suggestions, propagating and growing plants for the project, and Engineering students are planning monitoring and environmental quality measurements. The three year project employs long-term involvement in hands-on learning activities by an estimated 300 or more students per year and will result in solutions to two long-term water management problems on the Texas A&M University campus. Project objectives, plans and current accomplishments will be addressed. This work was funded by a Texas A&M University Tier One Program (TOP) Grant.