Springing into action with learning about green infrastructure
As spring nears, the University of Minnesota, Minnesota Sea Grant, and the Natural Resource Research Institute are hosting a webinar series about building resilient communities with green infrastructure.
The three-part webinar series designed to help Northeast Minnesota residents explore ways of using green infrastructure (GI) to make their homes and communities more resilient. Whether you’re dreaming of a summer project on your own property or curious about GI’s role in bigger community landscapes.
What is Green Infrastructure?
Green infrastructure is essentially practices that help to mimic the natural water cycle. Stormwater scientists use them a lot to manage water across our landscapes as a way to slow the flow of water to lakes and streams. These ways help not carry things like excess sediment and make sure that large volumes of water are not inundating our local waterways.
Stormwater scientist, Tiffany Sprague, spoke on a few ways that anyone can support the natural water cycle in their community.
“Rain barrels are probably the number one tool that we recommend. They’re low cost and they’re low maintenance. After that, things that we think about is, we fancy term is deep rooted perennial plants, but essentially native gardens are also one great way to hold water on folks’ property, as well as adding the benefits of things like habitat for pollinators and wildlife.”
Green infrastructure is not only applied to the Northland but can be considered anywhere. The webinar’s focus on Northern Minnesota, but the techniques can be applied all over to make communities more resilient and more sustainable.
“Green infrastructure really is for anyone from renters to homeowners, from large properties to small properties. Really, you can scale your practice to whatever fits your lifestyle and your size of lot,” Tiffany said.
Webinar Information
The first webinar series gives a broad overview of green infrastructure. Then the next webinar is all about native plants. There will be some guest speakers from Wild Ones and the Board of Water and Soil Resources to come to talk about native plants. Finally, the third webinar is going to be about what is green infrastructure in the community look like. City of Duluth staff and some Lake County staff will be invited to really help understand what’s happening all around but maybe don’t recognize as green infrastructure practices.
The full schedule with guests and ways to register can be seen below.
The recordings of the webinars will be available and posted to the Minnesota Sea Grant YouTube page afterwards for people to access. To register, you can also head over to their website.