Stormwater trees in urban runoff management: Water balance of the SenseCity Experimental Device

Faced with high levels of soil sealing combined with the effects of climate change, stormwater trees offer an adaptive solution for stormwater management. A stormwater tree is a street tree that has been designed to manage runoff from the adjacent pavement, while enhancing its development and various ecosystem services. It's a natured based solution for sustainable source control of runoff that's developing more and more, but whose operation is not yet completely mastered. The aim of the present study is to analyze and better understand the hydrologic functioning of such a device for a better application in the city, based on an experimental prototype, implemented in SenseCity, in Paris conurbation. SenseCity is a mini-city made up of a roadway and walls simulating a Canyon Street, with ball maples (Acer platanoide Globosum) planted on either side, one side of which is fed by runoff from 88m2 of pavement - these are the stormwater trees. The three stormwater trees are planted in a 1.6m-diameter reservoir with two main substrate layers, the first consisting of 20cm of Rainclean, a depollution filter providing temporary storage before infiltration into the deeper 60cm layer of topsoil. The runoff infiltrates through these two layers before reaching the clayey natural underground, where it can be exfiltrated to the soil and excess water can be collected in an underdrain. Various sensors were installed to study this system. These include inflow (Krohne Optiflux electromagnetic flowmeter), soil water content (Campbell SoilVue TDR probe), sap flow (Edaphic Implexx sensor) which allows to assess the evapotranspiration flux from the trees, outflow from the underdrain (Précis Mécanique 2x1-liter auger) and meteorological parameters. Most parameters are measured at 15-minute time steps.
The results obtained over one year (April 2022-March 2023) show exfiltration and transpiration rates on the system to represent respectively 53% and 27% of the inflow. Annual drainage accounts for around 19%. Exfiltration and transpiration are the main means of reducing runoff volumes. These different processes are not evenly distributed over the months. Transpiration rates are highest in summer, helping to cool the urban microclimate, while drainage and exfiltration is highest in winter. In summer, for example, transpiration rates were 41% and drainage 11%, while in winter transpiration was reduced to 5% and drainage increased to 32%.