Green Space Plan 2020
The Olentangy Watershed is currently home to 283,000 people. The Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC) expects this number to nearly double to 500,000 by 2050. With more people comes more development and more impervious surface. Maintaining a healthy watershed with this growth is a challenge that requires careful planning and coordination among several key stakeholders. FLOW’s Greenspace Plan is the first step of such coordination, ensuring that we are protecting and restoring the right places.
FLOW received funding from The Columbus Foundation to produce the Lower Olentangy Greenspace Plan. This was designed as a proactive planning effort to target the protection of high quality areas for the protection of the Olentangy watershed, while accommodating people’s needs for access to greenspace. The Greenspace Plan illuminates the value of accurately inventorying our existing natural resources, provides a framework to educate our citizens, and serves as a tool for prioritizing future efforts and making informed decisions.
The value of greenspace must be recognized for the ‘eco-services’ it provides. We can no longer think of greenspace as “just undeveloped” land. Greenspace provides very quantifiable benefits that cannot be replaced by any other means. Greenspace provides habitat, biodiversity, clean air, healthy places to recreate and heal, and mitigates heat island effects.
The Greenspace Plan assigned scores to land using 22 variables related to ecological resources and opportunities for restoration and protection. The scores were a result of weighting each variable and adding the weighted values of all variables for a particular piece of land. This was completed throughout the entire Lower Olentangy watershed. These were then categorized into five Greenspace Tiers, where Tier 1 represents those areas most important for water quality protection, and Tier 5 displaying the least opportunity for water quality protection. However, greenspace could exist in any of these tiers. Protection of these spaces may be more important within Tiers 1 and 2, whereas greenspace may need to be crated in Tiers 4 and 5.
This Greenspace Plan has been summarized in a report, and the results can be freely accessed here. We hope our partners take advantage of this Greenspace effort for future planning. According to the Trust for Public Lands, the average greenspace in the 100 largest cities in the U.S. covers 15% of their total area. Currently, the Olentangy only has 9% greenspace, and that is without the development anticipated by 2050. Now is the time to plan appropriately for adequate protection of our waterways, and FLOW is now turning its attention to using our Greenspace Plan to prioritize our restoration efforts.