The Longwood Collective, the chief planner and principal steward of the Longwood Medical and Academic Area (LMA), broke ground on a bioswale pilot project on Avenue Louis Pasteur on September 30, 2025. Simmons University, Northeastern University, and the Charles River Watershed Association collaborated with Longwood on this green infrastructure project. Simmons students will also be involved in regular soil, plant, water quality, and volume testing.
Supported by the City of Boston’s Edward Ingersoll Browne Fund, this project will harvest rainwater, promote resilient vegetation, reduce polluted runoff, and replace four aging trees at the end of their lifecycle. According to the Longwood Collective: “The bioswale will serve as both a functional stormwater management system and a living demonstration of how sustainable infrastructure can transform an urban streetscape.”
“This is very exciting — my students and I will be monitoring the health of the new installations: plant health, soil health, and comparing that to the existing green space on the street,” says Professor of Biology Anna Aguilera. “I’ve had students help already with establishing the methods, taking some pre-treatment baseline data, soil samples, and I have student involvement for the long-term so they can get long-term data sets to quantify the ecological benefits of this really exciting project.”