Boston Architectural College’s Green Alley Monitoring
Boston, MA
The Boston Architectural College’s “Green Alley” is an ambitious stormwater management project for a public alley in the heart of Boston, built to both manage stormwater as well as serve as an educational tool for the college’s faculty and students on green infrastructure design, environmental impacts, and environmental monitoring systems. The BAC hired Linnean to design a system for collecting and publicly displaying live data from the college’s Green Alley. The on-site monitoring system designed by Linnean consists of a weather station, flow monitors in the storm sewer overflow outlets, a groundwater-level monitor, and regular water quality tests—as well as an accessible public dashboard that displays the data in real time graphs in the lobby of the BAC’s main building.
Monitoring of the system has indicated that the Green Alley is achieving notable environmental benefits, including 99% stormwater retention, direct infiltration of site rainfall into the soil, a decrease in combined sewer overflow events, and an increase in water quality.