Abstract
Bioretention has become an effective option for the treatment of stormwater in urbanized watersheds. This field-scale study evaluated a bioretention system designed to reduce runoff volume and pollutant loading and compared its performance over a 13-month period with that of traditional asphalt pavement located in the same parking area at South Texas College (STC), McAllen, Texas. The average runoff volume from the bioretention cell was 82% lower than that of the traditional asphalt pavement section. Water quality samples from bioretention effluents showed a significant reduction (p < 0.05) in various pollutants, including indicator bacteria. For indicator bacteria, the bioretention showed an overall E. coli removal of 49%. Antecedent dry periods were found to influence the treatment performance of runoff reduction and water quality improvement. The bioretention cell field results were used to evaluate WinSLAMM model performance, and the calibrated model outflow volumes were not significantly (p > 0.05) different and showed a strong correlation with the observed results and calculated storage volumes.
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