CUGE has embarked on a research partnership with the Singapore Delft Water Alliance (SDWA) on water sensitive urban design. SDWA is a Research Centre of Excellence formed through the partnership between NUS and Deltares, a leading Dutch research institute focusing on water, soils and subsurface issues. The research partnership will initially focus on two research projects initiated to improve practices in the management of our green estate.

Monitoring of Nutrient and Pollutant Runoff in Waterbodies from Park Land

Parks maintenance practices such as application of compost, mulch, fertilizer and pesticides, while needed to ensure good health of plants, can potentially lead to contamination of adjacent waterbodies through nutrient and pollutant runoff via surface flows or deep infiltration. This is especially so for parks adjacent to reservoirs, or parks within water catchment areas. There can be exacerbated by a lack of knowledge of whether such current maintenance practices are optimal, or are in fact leading to excessive and wasteful discharge of nutrients and pollutants. To fulfil our value of environmental stewardship and minimize potential impact of our maintenance activities, CUGE and SDWA will commence a study in Bedok Reservoir Park to correlate actual maintenance activities with pollutant and nutrient runoff from the park. The study will shed light on whether our maintenance activities are a significant pollutant source. Targeted for completion by Dec 2010, the study will produce recommendations for targeted improvement in the maintenance regime that will also be relevant to other parks.

Selection of Suitable Plants for Bioretention Systems

A bioretention system is a specifically designed combination of growing media and plants that promote the removal of nutrients and pollutants from stormwater through a combination of fine filtration, biological uptake by plants, and breakdown by the micro-organisms in the rootzone. Bioretention swales (known as bioswales in America), together with bioretention basins (known as rain gardens in America) are very new in Singapore, and one of the critical success factors in their implementation is a careful selection of plants for application. Suitable plants need to be selected to withstand the drier root zone, as well as to optimize nutrient removal. To date, there is very little work done on plant selection for application in the tropics. Through the study, CUGE and SDWA will screen a selection of plants that will be adapted for bioretention systems in Singapore, and understand how the root structure of plants affect the performance of bioretention systems. The study will complete by May 2011, and will culminate in a handbook to disseminate the information to industry professionals to allow for successful implementation of bioretention systems in Singapore.