Identifying priority sites for low impact development (LID) in a mixed-use watershed

Low impact development (LID), a comprehensive land use planning and design approach with the goal of mitigating land development impacts to the environment, is increasingly being touted as an effective approach to lessen runoff and pollutant loadings to streams. Broad-scale approaches for siting LID have been developed for agricultural watersheds, but are rare for urban watersheds, largely due to greater land use complexity. Here, we introduce a spatially-explicit approach to assist landscape architects, urban planners, and water managers in identifying priority sites for LID based exclusively on freely available data. We use a large, mixed-use watershed in central Oklahoma, the United States of America, as a case-study to demonstrate our approach. Our results indicate that for one sub-catchment of the Lake Thunderbird Watershed, LID placed in 11 priority locations can facilitate reductions in nutrient and sediment loading to receiving waters by as much as 16% and 17%, respectively. We had a high rate of correctly identified sites (94 ± 5.7%). Our systematic and transferable approach for prioritizing LID sites has the potential to facilitate effective implementation of LID to lessen the effects of urban land use on stream ecosystems.