Factors That Scientists Look At While Collecting Data For The Health Of A Watershed

According to, West Virginia Department Of Environmental Protection, “A watershed is the area in which water flows through the lands and drains into a portion of gathering water such as rivers, lakes including the ocean (West Virginia Department Of Environmental Protection). The water usually comes from rain falls, stormwater runoffs as well. Also watersheds can cover a small or large land area and Ridge tops surrounding a body of water determine the boundary of a watershed. Watersheds are very important because do to the surface where water features and stormwaters runoff causing a drain to other bodies of water. According to Watershed Watch, they're also important because watershed are necessary in order to support habitat for plants,animals,

Think about the following statement: “Only communities located downstream in a watershed need to be concerned about how the water resources are managed in the watershed.” In my opinion, I strongly disagree with this statement. This essay will explain why even communities upstream a watershed should be concerned due to acid rain, and the risk of contaminated drinking water.

One natural way of helping stream/creek health is by not mowing the riparian zone (area around the banks of a creek). This allows the riparian zone to grow back, which helps filter storm runoff, like chemicals and trash that hurt the water quality of a stream. It also provides a habitat for many animals. It also saves money, because people/cities don’t have to mow as much. On the other hand, having a riparian zone doesn’t look as good. Also, they take up a lot of space, with one source saying it should be about 25 feet wide. (http://www.creekfreaks.net/sources-pollution-point-and-nonpoint)

• Does each individual sampling authority/program have enough sites to accurately measure the health of a watershed?

In the Case of the University High School Creek, the water quality is excellent. However, the quality of water is not excellent in all cases. In some areas, the water is polluted, even by humans. One way that Humans can pollute water is by using certain farming chemicals (such as nitrogen and phosphorus) and putting too large amounts of these chemicals on crops. Excess chemicals can run off into the creeks, causing a buildup of nitrates in the water. (River Water Quality and Pollution, 1998) This will cause too much algae to grow, which will take up all of the dissolved oxygen in the water. This means that there will be less dissolved oxygen for organisms to breathe, causing them to die. As well as runoff, Humans can dump chemical waste into

A watershed is like a natural drainage system that allows both rain and snow to be deposited into bodies of water. Watersheds are formed in all shapes and sizes depending on the hills and ridges. One of the bigger ones in colorado is the south platte river basin. Water that falls here mostly goes into the platte river which flows through Greeley, Boulder, Fort Collins, and Longmont. Watersheds are important because without them we wouldn’t have bodies of water scattered around the world which we use for many different things including agricultural use, recreational use. We don’t know it but without watersheds we would be struggling to get a good source of water. We must do something to help out theses watersheds for all the work they do

A watershed is the big pool of water that a certain region gets is source of water from. This can include ponds, rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water. The watershed is shared between humans and wildlife. We get all of our water from it, which includes anything from drinking water to the water we shower and bathe in. The watershed that we live in is the Cache la Poudre River watershed. This watershed “produces approximately 274,000 acres of water” (Northern Water). That is enough to provide for three major cities: Windsor, Fort Collins, and Greeley.

The water quality of the U-High creek was found to be excellent. Though the water has excellent quality, some other creeks have very poor water quality. This bad water is due to pollution, and pollution comes from humans. One way water quality can be tainted is pollution from farms. Fertilizer and farm waste can be very harmful to creek water quality. The fertilizer used on crops/ fields can runoff the fields and into creeks due to lots of rain. The chemical pollution in the water leads to high level of nitrate and phosphate. Algae uses this to grow very fast (eutrophication) and then dies and breaks down by bacteria which quickly multiple and use up all the oxygen killing the organisms in the water (Lenntech, 1998-2016). A second way that creeks can become polluted is through chemical waste from industrial companies. Chemical waste from industrial processes are sometimes accidentally dumped into rivers. Some of these chemicals include cyanide, zinc, lead, mercury, cadmium and copper. These toxins may enter the

Aquatic ecosystems are negatively affected by agricultural runoff because mercury and fertilizer decreases chance for reproduction and egg production. In addition, when chemicals and excess nutrients leak into the ground, it can be very dangerous to water quality in groundwater and drinking water. This spring, there has been a lot of heavy rainfall. In times like this, there will likely be a large amount of runoff.

The water quality of the U-High creek was determined to be excellent. However, not all areas of water have an excellent water quality. One way humans can negatively impact the water quality of an area of water can include using large amounts of fertilizers for the farming purpose of growing crops. These fertilizers end up draining into rivers and increasing the concentration of chemicals like nitrates and phosphates, thus causing the buildup of algae and blocking sunlight from providing energy to the organisms and plants in the water. Another way humans can impact the water quality negatively involves using chemical waste products in factories because chemicals like cyanide, zinc, copper, lead, and mercury in these products can get into rivers and kill off animals living in the water. Additionally, these chemicals can invade rivers so much that they affect the food cycle to the point where the tertiary and quaternary consumers

Portland, Oregon is one of the most sustainable cities in the U.S and is well-known for its urban appeal. Various bureaus within the city have consistently found ways to incorporate sustainability at a time when managing economic pressures and increased demands for natural resources have otherwise been challenging. It comes as no surprise then, that efforts in restoring watershed health play a large role in the city’s overall agenda. Every watershed within Portland’s jurisdiction serves an important purpose; and, while individual management plans do exist, a comprehensive plan has been created to give perspective of watershed health on a city-wide scale. Not only does this allow the city to

Watershed are a very important part of any environment. They collect any water that drains off the surrounding land and transports it into a larger body of water, such as a lake or stream. In simpler terms, a watershed is a drainage basin where all water, within its boundaries, collects (Perlman, 2016). Those boundaries are defined by their elevation. There are many factors that can change as a result from a shift in an urban watershed. The degradation of a watershed can be devastating to the surrounding ecosystems or cities through flooding. It is extremely important to consider what would happen and where the water would go if that watershed was disturbed in any way. They can also greatly affect the human population, and the cities they inhabit, as well as their ecosystems. Such disturbances can

he background of the nearest watershed became one of the first rivers to be set in Watersheds are important because we can use the water for many things. Watershed is water that drains into the land and ends up in one body of water. Watersheds can be described as a funnel which drains the water into the nearest body of water. It happens when it goes through the ground into creeks and streams and eventually an ocean. We all depend on a healthy watershed. ‘’The cache la poudre river watershed drains approximately 1,056 square miles.’’ www.northernwater.org.

Because streams play important roles in ecosystems and also provide drinking water for humans, this experiment was performed to determine if water velocity affects the health of a stream. For our purposes, water heath was determined by concentrations of dissolved oxygen. We predicted that areas of higher water velocity would have a lower chlorophyll a concentration and higher dissolved oxygen concentration. We collected six samples of water from Wild Basin Preserve in Austin, TX, three from areas of still water and three from areas of running water. We measured the dissolved oxygen concentrations of each sample using an YSI 550A Dissolved Oxygen Instrument and measured the chlorophyll a concentrations of each sample using a DU 800

The largest source of contamination is runoff from land. Toxic runoff can be sewage, rainwater flowing over exposed topsoil, flooding or agricultural runoff. Rain can cause runoff of chemicals or waste that can seep into creeks, rivers and other waterways that lead to the ocean. Some of the chemicals found could be antibiotics or waste from animals, pesticides from crops or from pollutants, originating in the air, which have settled on land and washed away. Unless a solution to pollution runoff is found, this type of contamination will continue indefinitely and contribute to the deterioration of the ecosystem in the