Ming-Han Li

Over the last decade, the Chinese government has focused on addressing development challenges in rural areas. The “Ecological Priority and All-Area Integrated Development” concept was thus developed, and it was found to be crucial for rural areas in Eastern Zhejiang Province. A new comprehensive evaluation system was composed by comparing and synthesizing existing Chinese assessment criteria, and landscape performance metrics developed by the Landscape Architecture Foundation. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation Method (FCE) were used to conduct post-development evaluation on six cases using the new evaluation system. The results of four cases show that ecology should be considered a high priority when dealing with rural community and small town developments. The other two cases emphasizing infrastructure development verified that “coordinating the development of rural communities and small town area” is crucial for building sustainable and livable rural communities, and avoiding redundancy and inefficiency. The newly developed comprehensive evaluation system integrates existing systems with a broader vision and is more holistic in its objectives for the region. The development-led intervention (based on landscape performance evaluation) is conducive to the implementation of a more scientific and comprehensive development model, with predictable performance.

The two-dimensional overland flow simulation program, FullSWOF_2D, was revised to include submodules of determining infiltration by zones (Z) and grate-inlet (G) drainage from a 2D surface to a 1D pipe flow. The updated program, FullSWOF-ZG, was used to evaluate the performance of a road-bioretention strip (RBS) system and explore/understand key parameters of continuous RBS design. The program was validated using eight pervious surfaces under simulated rainfall events and tested with 20 experimental cases of a locally depressed curb inlet. The mean difference of simulated interception efficiencies (36.6%–86.0%) and observed interception efficiencies (34.8%–84.0%) of the curb inlet was 3.5%, which proves the program predicts the curb-inlet interception efficiency accurately. The 20 road-only and 20 RBS modeling cases were designed and modeled using the FullSWOF-ZG program. These case studies have different road lengths, curb inlet lengths, longitudinal slopes, cross slopes, bioretention-overflow inlet heights, and bioretention soil infiltration parameters. Only 34.6%–48.4% of the total runoff volume is intercepted by the RBS’s curb inlet under heavy rainfall (250 mm/h) and the remaining part of the runoff flows downstream along the road, which may cause local inundation and become a safety hazard. The curb inlet becomes the bottleneck of the RBS system that could impede the runoff flowing into the bioretention strip for detention and infiltration to improve the stormwater quality.