Blue Green Streets is a University of Melbourne research program testing how stormwater can be used to irrigate street trees. It is part of the Melbourne Waterway Research-Practice Partnership and brings researchers together with people from consultancies, water authorities and local government. Jamie Tainton has been the program’s technical advisor, designing the civil infrastructure that turns its ideas into working pilot sites, including the systems that monitor them.
Why water street trees with stormwater
Street trees are usually planted into small pits surrounded by hard surfaces, while the rain that falls on the road beside them runs straight to the drain. Passive irrigation sends some of that runoff into the soil around the tree instead. The tree gets water without anyone having to deliver it, and less runoff reaches the waterways.
From research question to pilot site
A research question only becomes useful once it is built somewhere it can be measured. Jamie’s role is to take what the researchers want to test and design the civil works that make it buildable on a real site: the inlets, pits, pipes and storage, sized for the catchment and laid out so each treatment can be compared fairly against a control.
Jamie has been part of the program since its early pilots, including passively irrigated tree systems that capture road and carpark runoff, hold it in storage below the surface and let it soak into the soil around the trees. At each pilot, trees planted to the usual standard are compared with trees beside the same system with and without runoff, so the benefit of the water itself can be measured.
Monitoring that feeds back into design
The pilots are fitted with equipment to measure soil moisture, tree growth and how much stormwater the systems capture. Jamie designs the civil infrastructure those monitoring systems rely on and stays close to the results. That works both ways. The data tells the researchers what performs, and it tells Water Studio whether what it designs and advises on elsewhere holds up once it is in the ground.
See the Blue Green Streets pilot sites, including the designs and monitoring for each experiment.