Leaders in Stormwater: SHEREEN HUGHES, CBLP

This month’s LEADER IN STORMWATER is the Virginia Coordinator of the Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional Certification (CBLP) Program - Shereen Hughes, CBLP, Assistant Director of Wetlands Watch.

Shereen’s stormwater management (SWM) career blossomed while on James City County's Planning Commission working with SWM and watershed conservation, merging her experience as a consulting hydrogeologist and owner of a landscape design business. The County was an early adopter of low impact development (LID), following recommendations by Tom Schueler and the Center for Watershed Protection through the Better Site Design initiative and local watershed management plans. It made sense to Shereen and brought what were previously separate interests of hydrogeology and landscape design together. From there, she explored opportunities offered by the Stormwater Training Partnership.

In 2010, Shereen’s career path led her to Skip Stiles, Executive Director of Wetlands Watch - a 501 3c nonprofit in Norfolk - where she planted roots. Skip mentored and supported her efforts in moving Wetlands Watch into the stormwater arena in partnership with a consortium of organizations that manage the CBLP programs - administered by the Chesapeake Conservation Landscaping Council - certifying 1,200+ Level 1 professionals in the Bay Region to protect and restore natural resources and further integrate green infrastructure practices into watershed implementation and coastal resilience plans. Shereen stresses the need to plan for the management of all nature-based practices adaptively. She explains, “We’ve seen too many weedy, mismanaged BMPs that could be corrected with straightforward designs and plant experts on staff to ensure that practices remain attractive and functional.” That marrying natural environmental site design with SWM increases resilience and minimizes loss of natural green infrastructure; and that integrating this into university programs will train future leaders to approach SWM with a green focus for a resilient future. 

Shereen is interested in the relationship between natural systems, the built environment, and the people that live there. This is expressed in Wetlands Watch’s Mission Statement: We work where land, communities and water meet to conserve nature in a changing climate. Shereen and her family live in Williamsburg where she enjoys monitoring evolving wetland plant communities on the park trails. She sees the results of Wetland Watch’s efforts as a boundary organization, producing adaptation tools, strategies, and designs in tidewater Virginia by linking academic community programs with real-world needs in the coastal communities. An example of this is the Resilience Research & Design Collaboratory Project in Chesterfield Heights - a historic African American, low income waterfront community that received a grant to implement students' conceptual designs into the award-winning Ohio Creek Project where several students were then hired.