Best Management Practices Within My Watershed

By: Nicholas Perreault

I live in Plainfield, Connecticut, which means that I live in the Quinebaug River Basin. This watershed covers a total of 743 square miles in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, though dominating in Connecticut at 425 square miles. This watershed has plenty of water that is in fairly healthy condition. The annual precipitation in the watershed is about 45 inches (USGS, 2016). My home falls into the hydrological unit code 011000010702, which is called the Cory Brook-Quinebaug River Watershed. As seen in Figure 1, I saw that it was 2.66 square miles with a mean elevation of 210 feet. The report also told me that there is 7.84% developed land with 1.84% impervious surface (USGS, 2016). The mean annual precipitation, which is very similar to that in the Quinebaug River Basin report, is 48.686 inches, while the total length of streams is 3.76 miles and it has 16.2% of wetlands (USGS, 2016). Best management practices for water are structural, vegetative, or managerial practices used to treat, prevent, or reduce water pollution (Rouge River National Wet Weather Demonstration Project, n.d.). In this article, I will be analyzing a few BMPs that are in my own personal watershed.

Figure 1: An analysis of my personal watershed, as defined by USGS StreamStats (USGS, 2016).

One water management practice that takes place in my watershed is the use of storm drains, as seen in Figure 2. The storm drains are used in areas of the roads to move ponding water away from the road to make it safe for cars to drive down the road. These drains also move water away from areas that could easily wash out the road and carry off sediment. These drains empty into pits in the woods that help hold the water giving it time to percolate into the ground. This is important to reduce the amount of sediment that would eventually run off into the rivers and streams. This is practical and effective as it can be implemented anywhere there’s a problem and it is relatively cheap to implement. Once put in the storm drains can last a very long time. 

Figure 2: A storm drain located by my home in Plainfield, CT.

Another water management practice is building strategically. All the houses and roads are built around a wetland that eventually leads to a river. All the drains and other sources of water end up in these wetlands. This allows the surrounding community to be relatively dry while also allowing the water time to enter the groundwater in a healthy way. Wetlands help trap fertilizers and chemicals to allow microbes time to break them down. This makes them less harmful once they enter groundwater or a waterway. This works well because keeping the development away from the waterways keeps all the chemicals away from an area that could quickly enter the water. It also keeps construction away from the waterways, limiting the amount of extra sediment load going into the water. This is especially important in my watershed as we have a small quarry in the watershed. If this quarry was right next to the water it would definitely have a lot of sand and silt washing into the water. 

There is very little development near the waterways in the watershed. There is only one roadway that crosses sugar brook, the brook in my watershed. This means that my watershed has a healthy riparian zone allowing plants a sufficient amount of time to uptake excessive nutrients and help retain some of the water. A riparian zone is the land around the banks of a river or another water body, and a healthy one has a large covering of plants. This helps to keep the water clean in my watershed and also down river. Having little development in the waterways also means that there is very little impervious cover in the waterways making less run off improving the water quality of the brooks in our watershed. 

In my watershed we have strategically placed storm drains that help reduce the hazards of water while also moving the water ultimately into the ground in a responsible way. In the watershed the houses and roads were built away from waterways to help limit the amount of pollution being close to the water. We also have healthy riparian zones that take up pollution while also helping to trap some of the sediment.

References

Rouge River National Wet Weather Demonstration Project. (n.d.). Demo Info.

USGS, 2016, StreamStats Report, StreamStats Application version 4.3.0, U.S. Geological Survey, accessed

March 18, 2022, at https://streamstats.usgs.gov/ss/

Deforestation, Impervious Surfaces, and Domestic Animals Can Change Your Watershed

By: Nicholas Perreault

Changes within watersheds can have big effects on the quality of water and the amount of species that live there. You can calculate and learn more about your own watershed by using USGS Streamstats (USGS, 2016). My personal watershed is 2.66 square miles with a mean elevation of 210 feet (USGS, 2016). The USGS Streamstats report also told me that there is 7.84% developed land with 1.84% impervious surface within my watershed (USGS, 2016). The mean annual precipitation is 48.686 inches, while the total length of streams is 3.76 miles, and it has 16.2% of wetlands (USGS, 2016). Within my own personal watershed there is a gravel quarry owned by Rawson Material Company. Another factor that could be contributing an impact to my watershed is that Sugar Brook is crossed by a major roadway. The combination of an unhealthy riparian zone because of clearing from the road and the pollution from potential roadway runoff could lead to decreased water quality. In this article, I will highlight some changes that have occurred in my own watershed, and focus on how those changes can affect the natural word. 

Impervious Surfaces and Runoff

In my watershed, I have a lot of impervious cover. My watershed has a neighborhood with paved roads and a lot of driveways, as seen in Figure 1. Impervious surfaces can be detrimental to watersheds as they do not allow water to percolate through the soil in the way it should (NOAA, 2017). This can cause problems with groundwater as the lack of area for water to enter the ground can lower the underground water table (NOAA, 2017). Paving also eliminates the area for plants to grow. Plants play an important part in purifying water. Plants take up excessive nutrients and other contaminants in the water that cause problems with the water quality in our surface water. If these nutrients and contaminants are not filtered out, eutrophication can occur in our bodies of water. Eutrophication is when excessive nutrients get into our water bodies causing abnormal amounts of aquatic plant growth (O’Keefe and others, 2017). Eventually these plants die. When these plants decompose, the bacteria that decomposes uses up all the oxygen in the water (O’Keefe and others, 2017). This hypoxic condition causes fish to die off (O’Keefe and others, 2017). One other hazard of impervious surfaces is flash flooding. Flash flooding is when the water level of a river or normally dry area becomes flooded within minutes or hours. 

Figure 1: The above image shows the paved roads and driveways in the neighborhood around my home.

Deforestation

Forests are important to a watershed for many reasons. One of the reasons is that they help hold soils in place. Without these forests, the soil could easily be eroded by water and wind. In my neighborhood there is an area where they are starting to clear for a new house. As they clear for this house they are removing the native plants that are holding the soil together and keeping it from eroding. Keeping the soil from eroding is important because this soil could run off and enter the nearby stream increasing the turbidity. Turbidity is the measure of how clear the water is. This turbidity could damage aquatic life in the stream as it can block sunlight. Another major deforestation is a quarry that is in my watershed. This quarry is almost completely stripped of vegetation. An area of land this large stripped of vegetation will definitely lead to increased turbidity in Sugar Brook, the local brook in my watershed. In Figure 2 I was able to capture the image of some trees that were cut down for these projects, but could not take any others due to property rights.

Figure 2: A pile of native trees that were cut down to make room for a new home that is being put in within my watershed.

Domestic Animals

My watershed includes a neighborhood that has a lot of domestic animals, as seen in Figure 3. The animals are dogs, cats, chickens, and possibly some other livestock. This can add up to a lot of feces. When it rains, these feces can runoff into the storm drains, as seen in Figure 4, of the neighborhood and directly into the stream in my watershed. This can cause contamination of the water leading to human diseases like Escherichia coli from bacteria in the waste. This contamination can also move into people’s wells during flooding if their well submerges and especially if they have a faulty well. This can be detrimental to human health and lead to breakouts of infections that could even lead to death. Something else that can make this even worse is that people do not pick up after their dogs when they defecate. This makes the waste available to run off when a storm washes it away. If people did a better job picking up domestic animals may be less of a problem.

Figure 3: Domestic dogs can make large impacts on watersheds, as their feces can run off and act as nutrient pollution in water sources.

Figure 4: Storm drains are common along my road and all the roads within my watershed. These drains go directly to water sources, therefore preventing the runoff water from being filtered by the soil and plants.

This report went over stressors in my watershed. These stressors include impervious cover, deforestation, and domestic animal waste. Impervious cover causes precipitation to be unable to pass through the soil into the earth. This can increase the risk of flash flooding as well as allowing contaminates to move faster to water bodies. Deforestation causes the soil to erode quicker and run off into water bodies. This runoff can increase the amount of turbidity in a waterbody. Lastly the toll of domestic animals on the watershed was discussed. The animal waste can runoff and leach into people’s wells causing health issues. 

References:

O’Keefe, T.C., J.M. Helfield, and R.J. Naiman, 2017, Agents of Watershed Change, U.S. Environmental

Protection Agency Watershed Academy Web, accessed March 18, 2022 at

https://cfpub.epa.gov/watertrain/moduleFrame.cfm?parent_object_id=681.

US Department of Commerce, N. O. and A. A. (2017, November 30). What is a watershed? What is a

Watershed? Retrieved March 23, 2022, from https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/watershed.html

USGS, 2016, StreamStats Report, StreamStats Application version 4.3.0, U.S. Geological Survey, accessed

March 18, 2022, at https://streamstats.usgs.gov/ss/

Delineating and Describing Your Local Watershed

By: Nicholas Perreault

My name is Nicholas Perreault, I am from Northeast Connecticut, and I would like to share information about understanding watersheds. A watershed is an area that all drains to a particular body of water. This includes both water from anthropogenic and natural sources like precipitation. People should care about watersheds as everyone lives in one and actions taken in your watershed affects your quality of water. For example, if you live in the same watershed as a cattle farm, the runoff from that farm could be contaminating your water even if they live far away from you. The runoff from that farm has a high level of nitrogen. This nitrogen could cause eutrophication in a waterbody near you, which could cause hypoxia that would kill all the fish in that body of water. This is just a simple example of how someone else’s actions in a watershed could affect you. To gather the information that I used in this paper, I utilized the resources from the Environmental Protection Agency and The United States Geological Service. The programs used are called StreamStats, How’s My Waterway, Science in Your Watershed, and a published report from the United States Geological Service. All of these tools are free to the public and very easy to use. My name is Nicholas Perreault and I am studying Environmental Science at Eastern Connecticut University. I am writing this paper to explain the importance of being good caretakers of your watershed while also focusing on the health of my personal watershed, the Quinebaug River Basin. 

It is important to be conscientious of your actions and how they affect the watershed you live in. Using excessive amounts of fertilizer or pesticides on your property could runoff into rivers and limit the amount of species that can live in the waterway while at the same time making the groundwater unsafe to drink. Clearing large sections of ground can increase turbidity of a river near you and damage sensitive aquatic life or kill them all together. You must also remember that, at times, it may be easy to try to rationalize that your actions will not affect you, just someone farther down river. If every person thought this way everyone would be affected by the others upstream. This is because everyone lives downriver from someone else in a watershed. The health of your watershed is also a direct representation of the natural environment you live in. This means that if you enjoy living in an area with healthy biodiversity, you should care about your watershed health. 

I live in Plainfield, Connecticut, which means that I live in the Quinebaug River Basin. This watershed covers a total of 743 square miles in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, though dominating in Connecticut at 425 square miles. This watershed has plenty of water that is in fairly healthy condition. The annual precipitation in the watershed is about 45 inches (Water Resources Inventory of CT, 1966). This precipitation helps feed the many streams and small rivers in the basin as well as help support the plants and animals of the region. All of this rainfall and many rivers is also why there are many dams in the Quinebaug River Basin. These dams help to control flooding and are also sometimes used for hydrological electricity generation. Damming rivers may be good for human development, but it also has a negative effect on waterways. They can prevent water from flowing naturally and harm fish and plant species. 

When utilizing the site Science in Your Watershed, it is possible to identify specific unit codes for the watershed of your area. My home in Plainfield, CT falls into the hydrological unit code 01100001 (Ierardi, 2020).. The area of this code covers most of far eastern Connecticut, parts of western Rhode Island, and continues into a small part of mass directly north of northeastern Connecticut. The main river in this unit is the Quinebaug River, along with the Five Mile River, and two Unnamed RFI reaches (Ierardi, 2020). This watershed area and code, along with the four rivers, can be seen in Figure 1. 

Figure 1: The watershed 01100001 that includes the Quinebaug River, the Five Mile Rive, and two Unnamed RFI Streams. This information is derived from the USGS Science in Your Watershed (Ierardi, 2020).

To access a deeper understanding of your personal watershed and updated information about the various streams within, the website How’s My Waterway is the best. When I followed the quick and easy steps on the site, I found that my home falls into the hydrological unit code 011000010702, which is called the Cory Brook-Quinebaug River Watershed, as displayed in Figure 2 (EPA, 2022). This site also provides some interesting information about the water sources within the watershed. My waterway is healthy despite one impaired brook (EPA, 2022). This brook, the Aspinook Pond is eutrophic, and is listed with high levels of nutrient pollution (EPA, 2022). This watershed has three monitoring locations where they have never had an identified issue with water quality. There are also at 6 different locations where aquatic life was monitored and there were no unhealthy reports given. In addition to this there are currently seven different programs that are working to either restore or protect the watershed (EPA, 2022). 

Figure 2: From the source EPA How’s My Waterway, this image displays the streams in the watershed 011000010702, the Cory Brook-Quinebaug River (EPA, 2022).

The final source USGS StreamStats helps you to understand at an even deeper level the information about the watershed your home is located in. This site develops a report providing the drainage area, the mean basin elevation, the percent developed land, the percent impervious land, the mean annual precipitation, the total length of mapped streams, and the percentage of wetlands. In my own personal watershed, as visible in Figure 3, I saw that it was 2.66 square miles with a mean elevation of 210 feet(USGS, 2016). The report also told me that there is 7.84% developed land with 1.84% impervious surface (USGS, 2016). The mean annual precipitation, which is very similar to that in the Quinebaug River Basin report, is 48.686 inches, while the total length of streams is 3.76 miles and it has 16.2% of wetlands (USGS, 2016). Within my own personal watershed there is a gravel quarry owned by Rawson Material Company. Because of the nature of their operation, much of the natural plant cover has been stripped off leaving exposed land. This exposed land they dig to extract gravel. This kind of an operation has to be causing increased runoff. This runoff could be contributing to high levels of turbidity in the small streams in my watershed. Another factor that could be contributing an impact to my watershed is that Sugar Brook is crossed by a major roadway. The combination of an unhealthy riparian zone because of clearing from the road and the pollution from potential roadway runoff could lead to decreased water quality. 

Figure 3: This image is generated from the site USGS StreamStats, which displays my own personal watershed I was able to generate (USGS, 2016).

Understanding what a watershed is and how we all contribute to its health is necessary to maintain the health of the world and of the human population. Every person lives in a watershed and contributes to its health, so understanding where yours is and how to identify it can be a great tool in becoming a knowledgeable citizen of the Earth. Sites such as the USGS Science in Your Watershed, EPA How’s My Waterway, and the USGS ScienceStats are excellent to help anyone learn more about their impact on the world around them.

References

Environmental Protection Agency. (n.d.). How’s My Waterway? EPA. Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://mywaterway.epa.gov/community/20%20Pine%20St,%20Plainfield,%20CT,%2006374,%20USA/overview

Ierardi, M. C. (n.d.). Science in your watershed. Science in Your Watershed – HUC 01100001. Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://water.usgs.gov/wsc/cat/01100001.html#.html

StreamStats. (n.d.). Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://streamstats.usgs.gov/ss/

Water Resources Inventory of connecticut part I Quinebaug … (n.d.). Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://pubs.usgs.gov/ctwrb/0008/report.pdf