Sustainable Sites

Initiative
Dr. Steve Windhager

Editor

Werner Lang
Aurora McClain

csd
Center for Sustainable Development
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Sustainable Sites Initiative
Dr. Steve Windhager
Figure 1: This bio-retention system in Missouri helps to filter water back into the ground after a heavy rain event
Introduction
The Sustainable Sites Initiative is a joint
project between the American Society of
Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson
Wildflower Center, and the United States Bo-
tanic Garden. In recognition of the tremendous
burden current landscaping practices place
on our infrastructure, wildlife habitats, limited
resources and waterways, these organizations
have joined to develop a set of guidelines and
standards for sustainable landscape practices.
They aim not only to protect our environment,
but facilitate the development of ecosystem
services to improve our quality of life.
The term green can be misleading, as not
all green landscapes are sustainable. A well
functioning landscape provides services that
we need to live, free of charge. These Ecosys-
tem Services, provided by a well-planned and
maintained site, offer many benefits beyond
their aesthetic appeal. While a wide range of
ecosystem services have been identified by
various authors over the last 10 years1 the
Sustainable Sites Initiative focuses on 12
primary services: global climate regulation, lo-
cal climate regulation, air and water cleansing,
water supply and regulation, erosion and sedi-
ment control, hazard mitigation, pollination,
habitat functions, waste decomposition and
treatment, human health and well being ben-
efits, food and renewable non-food products,
3.1 Sustainable Sites Initiative
and cultural benefits.
The 12 primary services
Global climate regulation would create
breathable air at historic temperatures by
maintaining a balance of atmospheric gases
and sequestering greenhouse emissions. As
implementation is always at local levels, this
would include: regulating local temperature,
precipitation, and humidity through plant
services such as shading, evapotranspiration,
and windbreaks. Research in New York City
indicates that a single tree provides $ 5.60 in
benefits for every dollar spent on its care.2
In addition to climate regulation, the project
strives to cleanse our air and water by remov-
ing and reducing pollutants. According to
one study in 1991, trees in the Chicago area
removed as much as 234 tons of particulate
matter, 210 tons of ozone, 93 tons of sulfur
dioxide and 17 tons of carbon monoxide from
the air annually.3
25-50% of all municipal energy use in the
US is used for pumping or treating wastewa-
ter.4 Coupled with the fact that 30-60% of all
residential water use is used for landscape
irrigation,5 this indicates a serious need to
reconsider our current water management
practices.
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Figure 2: Garden/Garden, Santa Monica, CA. A 4 year comparison in Santa Monica between a native garden and a traditional
garden showed that the native garden used 219,585 fewer gallons of water, produced 428.5 fewer pounds of green waste, and
cost $152.78 less than the traditional garden below
Figure 3: Garden/Garden, Santa Monica, CA. Traditional Garden
Rainwater can be harvested on site and ap-
plied to landscape needs, thus turning what is
seen as a problem into a resource. Stormwa-
ter can be retained on site or slowed using
Low Impact Development (LID)6 techniques
such as green roofs, rain gardens, bioswales,
biofiltration basins, and similar technology
that allow water to infiltration into the soil to
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provide water and nutrients for plant growth
and recharge local aquifers or groundwater.
A site with reduced impervious cover and rain
gardens puts a reduced rate of stormwater
discharge into stormwater systems, which re-
duces the downstream pollution resulting from
combined sewer overflows.7 These systems
convey both raw sewage and stormwater in
the same lines, and when the capacity of the
pipes are exceeded, result in the discharge
of raw sewage into our creeks, streams and
rivers. Effective stormwater management
and responsible construction practices also
prevent damage from erosion and siltation
thus protecting downstream ecosystems. Site
development practices which preserve riparian
buffers and coastal wetlands provide signifi-
cant hazard mitigation benefits by reducing
ecosystem vulnerability to flooding and storm
surges.8 Well designed landscape will also
reduce local vulnerability to hazards of wildfire
and drought.9
LEED and sustainable landscape design
The LEED program is a voluntary rating sys-
tem under which building design and construc-
tion goes through a performance based rating
for energy efficiency and overall sustainability
which is verifies by a third party reviewer. The
program has had a marked impact on the
building industry. In the first ten years of the
programs existence, it has had significant
effects not only in design and construction,
but also in material manufacture, transport,
resource harvesting, and post consumer
handling of all building materials. Its more sys-
tematic assessment of building performance
is reforming the ways in which both profes-
sionals and increasingly the public gauges
quality in construction and design. While green
building currently only affects 1% of the total
construction market in the United States, this
already represented over $10 billion and is
rapidly increasing. The Sustainable Sites Initia-
tive hopes to have a similar effect in making
sustainable design and construction practices
in the landscape much more common by pro-
viding a voluntary recognition based program
based on the LEED model.
The U.S. Green Building Council along with
a number of other participating organiza-
tions is cooperating in the development of the
Sustainable Sites Initiative which will supple-
ment existing LEED (Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design) rating system criteria
with a greater array of guidelines for more
sustainable site construction and landscape
design criteria. The current LEED program
only minimally addresses issues of siting and
landscape performance. Additionally, these
guidelines would apply to sites with only mini-
mal building components, allowing a greater
array of projects such as parks, campgrounds,
highways, and campuses to participate in
sustainable design practices. The following
pages show the system that the Sustainable
Sites Initiative has developed to measure the
effectiveness of site solutions.
 3.1 Sustainable Sites Initiative

Conclusion: The need for green

site solutions
World population is only increasing plac-
ing greater demands on natural processes
to provide ecosystem services. Greenfield
development will continue even with urban infill
and brownfield redevelopment10 and this will
place even greater demands on ecosystems
which are already stressed. Conservation of
these remaining systems is not enough under
these circumstances. Increasingly, we must
find ways to design sites so that they enhance
the production of critical ecosystem services.
We can no longer rely on preserved open
space to meet our demands for clean air and
water, carbon sequestration, or a host of other
services. We must identify the critical services
which need to be provided for in our communi-
ties and design our sites both buildings and
landscapes to be able to produce them.

Figure 4: The natural hydrologic cycle

Figure 5: This schematic diagram suggests how well different types of sites provide ecosystem services. The goal of the Sustainable Sites Initiative is to rehabilitate all sites to perform as greenfields.

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Notes
1. G Daily, ed. Natures Services: Societal
Dependence on Natural Ecosystems (Wash-
ington, DC: Island Press, 1997) and RS de
Groot, MA Wilson, and RMJ Boumans. A
typology for the classification, description and
valuation of ecosystem functions, goods and
services, Ecological Economics 41, no. 3
(2002): pp 401-402.)
2. Peper,PJ et all, New York, New York: Mu-
nicipal Forest resource Analysis.2007,Center
forUrban Forest Research, USDA Forest
Service,Pacific Southwest Research Station.
p.72
3. McPherson,G, D.J. Nowak and R.A. Rown-
tree, Chicago Urban Forest Ecosystem:results
of the ChicagoUrban Forest climate Project,
Department of Agriculture,Forest Service
and Northestern Forest Experiment Station,
Editors.1994.p.201
4. From Water and Energy Technology Team
(WETT) at Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory (LBNL) http://water-energy.lbl.gov/
node/16
5. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
Outdoor Water Use in the United States, 2007
6. Low Impact Development Center, Sustain-
able Design and Water Quality Research,
http://www.lowimpactdevelopment.org/links.
htm
7. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Why
Water Efficiency? Water Sense: Efficiency
Made Easy [webpage] 2007 [cited 30 Aug
2007]; Available from: www.epa.gov/Wa-
terSense/water/why.htm. for the South Texas Natives (a project of the
8. Bourne, Jr., Joel, The Big Uneasy. National
Geographic http://ngm.nationalgeographic.
com/ngm/0410/feature5/index.html (2004)
9. U.S. Forest Service, Firewise Communi-
ties, http://www.firewise.org/
10. Heid, J, Greenfield Development Without
Sprawl: The Role of Planned Communities,
Washington, D.C.: ULI the Urban Land Insti-
tute Working Paper Series, (2004).
11. Biographical Information from the UTSOA
website at http://soa.utexas.edu/people/profile/
windhager/steve
3.1 Sustainable Sites Initiative
Figures governmental entities and developers to make
this development method more common.
All images used by permission from the Lady
Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Sustainable Steves recent consulting projects include
Sites Initiative. working with Carter Burgess on a restoration
plan for the Mission Reach of the San Antonio
River - an 8-mile stretch of the river which will
Resources be restored to native vegetation and contain
hiking and biking trails to connect the four
www.sustainablesites.org/ historic Spanish missions along the river, work-
ing with NASA to convert much of the turf at
www.wildflower.org/ the Johnson Space Center to native wildflower
meadows, and working with Denver Botanic
buildcarbonneutral.org Gardens at Chatfield to develop a site master
plan for that location.
www.austinenergy.com/Energy%20Efficiency/
Programs/Green%20Building/index.htm - Steves research interests include the role of
fire and other historic ecological processes in
restoring the Texas Hill Country, and the role of
competition in controlling invasive species.
Biography
As Director of the Landscape Restoration
Program at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower
Center, Steve oversees the Centers eco-
logical research, natural areas management,
and consulting programs. He holds a B.A. in
Philosophy from Texas A&M University, and
a M.A. in Environmental Ethics and a Ph.D.
in Environmental Science from the University
of North Texas. Steve has over 10 years of
experience in ecological restoration, with most
that experience dealing with Texas Blackland
Prairie and the Eastern portion of the Edwards
Plateau. Steve is a past board member of
the Society for Ecological International and is
currently on the editorial board for Restoration
Ecology and Environmental Ethics and Chairs
the program committee for the American As-
sociation of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta.
Steve sits on the technical advisory boards
Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute)
and the North American Butterfly Associa-
tions Butterfly Park in Mission, Texas. His
past commitments have included the finance
committee of the Texas Section of the Grazing
Lands Conservation Initiative, board member
for the Hays County Parks Advisory Board,
and founding president of the Texas Society
for Ecological Restoration.
Steves program is currently working with the
American Society of Landscape Architects
(ASLA) on the development of Sustainable
Design and Development Standards for
Landscapes. This program will create design
standards for landscapes (such as parks, road-
ways, and gardens) which will be similar to the
U.S. Green Building Councils LEED program
(Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design. Closer to home, Steves program is
also developing Conservation Development
standards for Texas, and working with regional