Congratulations to the 8 students (7 from the T-RUST family!) who were recently awarded the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) P3 student design competition: People, Prosperity, and the Planet.

The project, entitled GIS-informed urban groundwater monitoring networks, will understand how green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) affects urban groundwater quality and flow by piloting a network of community-based groundwater monitoring stations surrounding GSI sites in Detroit, MI. The technical challenge is to develop a scalable model of relatively low-cost groundwater monitoring stations to measure groundwater flow and quality at the neighborhood scale.

The project will benefit residents of the city of Detroit and surrounding communities by piloting a groundwater monitoring network that can elucidate connections between GSSI and groundwater, identify potential exposure pathways for contaminants, and provide community education and engagement around the importance of groundwater resources in the Great Lakes region.

This was truly an interdisciplinary effort, involving graduate students from Civil & Environmental Engineering, Biology, Anthropology, and Urban Studies and Planning. The T-RUST faculty leads are Dr. Carol Miller (Civil & Environmental Engineering) and Dr. Rahul Mitra (Communication).

Amazing work; congrats to you all: Brittanie Dabney, Kate Ekhator, Darrin Hunt, Colleen Linn, Natalie Lyon, Brendan O’Leary, Adam Pruett, and Sadaf Teimoori.