Grounding water: Integrated methods for nature-based solutions in Great Lakes urban coastal regions

Urban coastal regions in the Great Lakes Basin are increasingly vulnerable to destructive flooding driven by climate impacts, outdated gray infrastructure systems, and a legacy of urban hydrological alteration and habitat fragmentation. While Nature-based Solutions (NbS) offer a path to adaptation, their implementation is often hindered by governance fragmentation, uneven regional resources, and a lack of integrated planning and design tools. This article discusses a transdisciplinary research through design framework that translates complex hydrological, ecological, and socio-spatial datasets into a suite of multimodal tools that serve as boundary objects for regional NbS planning in Southeast Michigan. The study's core contribution is a transferable and translational methodology that bridges the gap between technical and institutional protocols, the practices of organizations stewarding existing green stormwater infrastructure projects, and the disparate experiences of flooding across urbanized watersheds. Findings show that the act of designing these tools as translational devices - such as interactive and thematic cartographies, actor-network diagrams, and sets of NbS and multispecies habitat cards - evidences a mode of inquiry that allows diverse actors to move from reactive control paradigms toward a relational framework for addressing regional interdependencies.