'Tis the season for flooding and road washouts. Not only can they create inconvenient, time-consuming detours and safety risks, but they're also expensive to repair. And as climate change brings more extreme weather, including heavier rains, the cost of adapting infrastructure is expected to go up, along with the cost of repairing damage. But a study in Parkland County, Alta., west of Edmonton, shows one way to cut the costs of those upgrades and repairs — by spending strategically on "green infrastructure," such as building or restoring wetlands, which can work to protect "grey infrastructure," such as roads. "We also wanted to show that the cost of doing that [wetland restoration] is usually less than the cost of having to re-engineer or reconstruct the road or the drainage area“ The county partnered with local watershed conservation groups and Wanhong Yang, a professor in the department of geography, environment and geomatics at the University of Guelph in Ontario, who helped them do the geographic mapping and modelling for the project.