User:BrianAsh

I have a life-long interest in the fate of substances in the environment. Much of my understanding of rain gardens came from garden depressions I dug to keep lawn paths dry while in high school. I remain excited by the potential impact of rain gardens, green roofs, and related low impact development technologies.

Wikipedia is not a prestigious peer reviewed journal, but its accessibility makes it ideal for communicating sustainable technology. Wikipedia readily connects young minds to once obscure information and avoids the struggle I experienced trying to learn about such topics. Wikipedia describes what something is and refers readers to key resources on the topic. It is itself referenced in peer reviewed journals as an efficient path to verifying facts established elsewhere.

I encourage others to release information to the public domain when it is in the interest of sustainable civilizations. Such information is worth more if it is free for those who need it. We all benefit from ecological health. I contribute to Wikipedia, to acknowledge the existence of technology that deserves to be more widely known.

I contributed the transpiration appendix found in Plants for Stormwater Design, Species Selection for the Upper Midwest, Vol II: By Dan Shaw, M.L.A and Rusty Schmidt. I presented a poster, and a paper describing an early version of my simple simulation model of a rain garden at the 2006 ASABE International Meeting.

I hope to share more, perhaps publish my MS paper on rain garden simulation in a free Wikimedia like form, once I find time to proof read it a final time. One goal is to illustrate aspects of how rain-gardens operate. Wish I could include crop coefficient curves for all Minnesota's native plants, but determining them is not so simple, and the rights to publish other people's data would need to be secured. I'm still digesting other people's research, even after graduation. The USDA PLANTS database seems the best destination for such location and species specific information. I will contact the NRCS if my free time yields a contribution worthy of their attention. I would link to more about myself, but I fear junk mail.

Brighter minds than mine make a living by tackling fundamental questions;I merely hope to share useful information in more accessible forms, and to apply what I learn as a hobby. [appropedia,org] is a great place to share how-to-knowledge.