The Urban Watershed Evolution project was a collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach toward understanding the impacts of urbanization on natural waterways within the Austin area to work towards establishing a framework for policies and governance that increased ecological and societal resilience in urban centers. Our approach involved assessing the ecological diversity and health of heavily urbanized watersheds, comparing water chemistry and bacteria concentrations under normal and stormflow conditions, and surveying neighborhood residents to understand the opportunities for and barriers to implementing green stormwater infrastructure. This project resulted in the creation of new, fast computation and modeling methodologies to uncover the causes and potential cascading failures when an extreme event hits a system as well as novel sensing equipment designed to monitor riparian ecosystem productivity.