#20 - Belinda Hatt: Stormwater control measures, healthy waterways, battleships and karate at the riverside camp

Belinda Hatt, waterways and wetlands research specialist at Melbourne Water and University of Melbourne, Australia, reflects on her journey through academia and practice around creating healthy waterways and her work on stormwater control measures or Water Sensitive Urban Design, in particular, rain gardens for water quality management.

Podcast Intro/Outro Song: Breaking Sweat by Balloon Planet (Check out more of their tunes over at Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/balloon-planet)

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:12 Guest Intro and ‘Battleship’
3:57 Preferred term for Blue-Green Infrastructure and Raingardens
5:57 From words to environmental sciences and camping
9:09 The impact of urbanization on waterways
13:49 The Millennium Drought
15:14 Stormwater harvesting and constructed wetlands
17:50 Scalable technology? What are raingardens?
19:47 10,000 Raingardens - an operation and maintenance challenge
21:13 Stormwater quality management in Melbourne today
23:01 Multiple benefits of raingardens and other nature-based solutions
23:54 How to… Stormwater harvesting - collection, treatment, storage
24:53 More about the considerations for stormwater storage
28:00 Pollutant removal in raingardens
31:36 Plant selection for raingardens
33:23 The Adoption Guidelines for Stormwater Biofiltration
35:55 Challenges in raingarden planning and design
36:40 The journey after leaving academia
39:59 An interdisciplinary approach needed nowadays
41:51 Coming back into academia and merging pathways
44:13 Melbourne Water’s healthy waterways strategy
47:19 A post-pandemic city and the role of green spaces
49:43 Q&A Start
50:00 Belinda’s affection for Karate
53:48 Key event, person, book
55:11 Biggest challenge in career to date
58:08 If you had a magic wand?
58:42 Time management
1:00:35 Advice for young researchers
1:02:59 Where can people reach you?
1:03:50 Final Message
1:04:15 Outro

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