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South Dakota State University College of Design landscape architecture instructor Jeremiah Bergstrom received the top award from the New Jersey Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects for his collaborative project on rising flood waters.
The American Society of Landscape Architects is the professional association for landscape architects with multiple chapters throughout the United States.
The project, “Creating Flood-Resilient Landscapes: A Primer for New Jersey Communities,” won the Chapter Award, the project’s most prestigious award in the research and communications categories.
A total of 21 projects participated this year, 11 of which won awards.
This is one of several awards Bergstrom has received from the New Jersey Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects. In 2011, he won the Environmental Improvement Award and the Landscape Design Communication Merit Award; in 2014, he won the Environmental Improvement Award; in 2017, he won the Landscape Design Planning Merit Award, the Landscape Design Communication Merit Award, and the Environmental Improvement Award.
Bergstrom’s merit awards include projects related to environmental improvements, floodplain restoration and instruction manuals.
This year’s award recognizes a collaborative project that resulted in a guidance document for creating flood-resilient landscapes in communities across the United States. This first-of-its-kind guide is designed to provide communities and their officials with resources to help restore flood-prone properties to pre-flood functionality.
Bergstrom and former Rutgers colleagues initially proposed the project in 2019 and have been working on it ever since. Former SDSU students Shelbie Smith, Emma Martin, and Alyssa Faber all made significant contributions to this document.
“I know we’ve covered a lot of relevant topics and worked very hard to convey complex concepts in a way that a broad audience can understand,” Bergstrom said. “Creating this document really required a team effort with a very diverse skill set and knowledge base, from landscape architects to ecologists, planners, graphic designers, public officials and engineers.”
Bergstrom hopes the guide will enable communities to view flood-prone landscapes as assets and equip them with the tools to restore them.
“Flooding is a natural process, and if our human activities encroach on these landscapes, we are bound to have problems,” Bergstrom explains. “This primer illustrates the meaning and importance of rethinking our relationship with rivers and lakes and how they support and protect our communities. We need to think of these resources and landscapes as green infrastructure networks that are critical to the survival of our communities are just as important as the roads, pipelines and grid infrastructure we build.”
Learn more details about the project online.
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