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A rain garden completed recently near the Benton County Community Development Department in Corvallis does more than treat stormwater. It also serves as an outdoor laboratory.

The lab provides a rare field testing opportunity for Oregon State University researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of bio-swales and other green infrastructure to treat stormwater.

鈥淵ou want to actually go and test them at the field scale,鈥� said Meghna Babbar-Sebens, an assistant professor with the OSU School of Civil and Construction Engineering. 鈥淭he main idea was to enable that kind of testing.鈥�

Babbar-Sebens is leading research at the OSU-Benton County Stormwater Infrastructure Research Facility. Benton County contributed money and land for the $126,000 demonstration project, which will filter runoff from a 100,000-square-foot portion of a county industrial yard where equipment for parks and roads maintenance is stored. Other funders include Oregon BEST, the city of Corvallis and the Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium.

Benton County officials were seeking an alternative to traditional piped stormwater treatment at the site and pleased to also offer a green infrastructure research opportunity in a public location, said Adam Stebbins, a county project coordinator.

鈥淲e don’t have a good idea how these things work. We just know they do good things,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e want to support and see what type of treatment is occurring, what the positive impacts are and share that with the community.鈥�

The rain garden research facility has a weather station and is wired with sensors that monitor the flow and quality of stormwater as it moves through the plants and soil. Researchers can use the data collected to assess maintenance issues and test the effectiveness of different types of soils and plants at treating runoff, Babbar-Sebens said. The research facility is the only one in Oregon with a specific focus on field testing ground-level green infrastructure, she said.

鈥淩eally, the main goal, especially for publicly funded projects, is to have that data available to the public,鈥� Babbar-Sebens said.

The stormwater lab is broken up into three 93-foot-long, 10-foot-wide sections with different soil mixtures and plants. Stormwater is pumped from the Benton County industrial yard into a storage tank before it is evenly distributed among the garden’s three sections. The garden is rigged so that researchers can control when runoff flows into it and for how long.

鈥淲e capture the stormwater, we run it through the facility, we monitor what’s going on and then we let it out,鈥� Babbar-Sebens said. 鈥淪o people can actually do controlled experiments. There are so many unknowns about how these systems perform, so this allows us to observe very carefully.鈥�

Oregon BEST, which supports clean technology innovation, helped connect Beaverton-based Puralytics with OSU to test its LilyPad 鈥� a product being developed to treat stormwater on construction sites. One of the rain garden lab sections is dedicated to beta testing the LilyPad. Puralytics CEO Mark Owen said the field test will help the company assess the product’s effectiveness of treating runoff during varying levels of storm severity.

鈥淭he real benefit of it for a new technology in the water space is you need this third-party validation,鈥� he said. 鈥淗aving a well-designed (testing) system 鈥� is critical.鈥�