The Creation of a Rain Garden Template and Recommended Sites for Future Rain Gardens on Allegheny College’s Campus.

Ave, Olivia

The Creation of a Rain Garden Template and Recommended Sites for Future Rain Gardens on Allegheny College’s Campus.

Persistent URL

https://hdl.handle.net/10456/57670

Author(s)

Ave, Olivia

Date Issued

May 11, 2024

Abstract

With global temperatures rising, weather patterns are becoming more and more erratic. This has led to many issues involving water absorption in soils especially in loam and clay based soils such as the ones found on Allegheny College’s campus (Bellocchi G., et al., 2018). As it is one of Allegheny College’s goals to promote sustainability in and outside the classroom I propose Allegheny begin installing rain gardens once again (Sustainability, 2020). Allegheny has not done such in about 10 years (Personal conversation, Kelly Boulton, 2024). There are many benefits that would be provided by the addition of several new rain gardens on Allegheny College’s campus. This would include a reduction of pooling after precipitation events, runoff filtration, increased soil health, as well as provide many benefits to native wildlife. The native wildlife would benefit greatly due to the resources, shelter, food, and water that a rain garden could provide. In order to continue creating rain gardens on campus, the goal of this project was to create a template that Allegheny College could use to more efficiently create rain gardens on campus. As supplementary materials to this template, diagrams of each rain garden were created and 4 separate sites were selected. A plan was not created for each site, but suggestions and the groundwork for each site were laid out including images of each site and how the rain gardens would fit in these spaces.

Major

Environmental Science and Sustainability

First Reader(s)

Bethurem, Matt