Landscape Design, stormwater and Natural Process

Rain, the life blood of all things in the natural world, is one of the most needed elements for the survival of all species. Without rain, life as we know it would cease to exist, the earth would become a dead planet. While we know that we need rain, we have failed to recognize all its functions and processes. This has created a problem, one that affects all locations on a global scale: the problems of stormwater. In order to understand the problems of stormwater one needs to start at the beginning by looking at each process as a part of the larger picture. Processes such as the watershed as a whole unit, how the hydrologic cycle works, and just why wetlands are so important in the process of handling stormwater. In each step of a project there are processes such as interception, infiltration, evaporation, and nutrient uptake. While all of these processes usually happen naturally, under degraded situations these processes change or become extreme in some form or another. To stop these extremes we need to understand each process and use them to our advantage in our projects, making process part of the design