Managing watersheds requires analysis of an accounting unit to determine the best practices that apply to that specific case, these are referred to as best management practices, or BMPs. The watershed being examined in this article is the local watershed around Osbornedale state park in Derby Connecticut. This accounting unit (Figure 1) has a drainage area of 2.51 square miles, has a mean basin elevation of 228 feet, and an average soil permeability of 4.509 inches per hour, and it empties into the Housatonic river. BMPs are implemented to support functions of watersheds such as wildlife habitats, and water runoff. The examples that will be discussed in this article are limited land use, a wet pond, and a grassed swale.
Figure 1: Streamstats report of the examined watershed.
Limited land use
Figure 2: wetland area
The watershed encompassing osbornedale state park benefits from the existence of the park because there has been minimal human made changes to its natural state relative to the more developed surrounding areas. The example given in figure 2 shows a small wetland area that has been minimally developed and is still a habitat for various animal species. Leaving this area in a mostly untouched state allows the watershed to function uninterrupted as runoff can flow through the area to the outlet at its natural pace without risk of flooding nearby roads.
Wet pond
Figure 3: pond at Osbornedale State Park
There is a manmade pond within the local watershed that acts as extra storage for water.(figure 3) Frequent and dramatic change in water level can be observed at the pond depending on the amount of recent precipitation. Ponds such as this provide protection from flooding, more habitats for aquatic animals, and added appeal to the recreation area.(EPA)
Grassed swale
Figure 4: Grassed Swale at Osbornedale State Park
A grassed swale is an engineered feature of a landscape that allows for fluid flow. The purpose of the feature is to improve water quality and act as a channel for stormwater runoff. (NJGOV 2010) In the case of the osbornedale watershed, the swale has been constructed on a high and flat area to improve runoff flow from the high point of the watershed. Without the swale, flooding could be possible for nearby residents and roads. In addition to runoff management, the grass within the channel acts as a filter to storm water which helps improve and maintain water quality within the accounting unit.
In summary, best management practices are key to maintaining the health and effectiveness of a watershed. BMPs can be seen in many forms across watersheds, but the managers of the osbornedale watershed identified a need to direct runoff, and prevent flooding, as most of the BMPs implemented are focusing on these potential issues
It is extremely necessary to keep your watershed clean, as we all live within and rely on watersheds. Best management practices, or BMPs, are the execution of methods with the aim of diminishing or totally preventing pollution from negatively impacting waterways (U.S. EPA, 2022). BMPs can be quite easy to recognize once you are able to see them, and some examples include planning ahead for construction, forestry, and harvests, surrounding waterways with substantial vegetation, and chemical use management (U.S. EPA, 2022). By analyzing my own watershed, I will provide examples of BMPs, and ways to understand what qualifies as such so that you may obtain the tools to review the practices within your own watershed, and hopefully make changes for the better.
My personal watershed is about 4.07 square miles, which includes 7.94% of developed land, 1.77% impervious surface, and 11.1% wetlands (USGS, 2016). This drainage area, or watershed, also has a mean elevation of 568ft, has around 11.4 miles of mapped streams, receives 50.592 inches of mean annual precipitation per year, and the average soil permeability is 4.285 inches per year (USGS, 2016). All this information was accessible for free from the site USGS StreamStats, where I was provided not only such detailed statistics about my own drainage area, but I was also given an outlined image, as seen in Figure 1 and Figure 2 (USGS, 2016). If you are interested in knowing where your own watershed is, and the location your practices directly impact, I highly recommend USGS StreamStats, so that you can understand changes that have occurred through human and natural activities. Proper management practices can certainly induce change within a watershed for the better, so having the skills to recognize and implement such practices is necessary in keeping the world around you safe for yourself and other species.
Figure 1: An image of my town with the highlighted block of my personal watershed (USGS, 2016). Figure 2: The characteristics of my personal watershed as provided by USGS Streamstats alongside the highlighted image (USGS, 2016).
One management practice, which can be seen not only around the small brook in my backyard, but around most all water bodies within my watershed, is the buildup of a riparian zone. A riparian zone is the boundary between land and water, which, in a healthy location, should have surplus growth of plants around it. This not only holds the banks of the stream stable, but also provides necessary habitats for species and filters the water that will eventually runoff into the water body. Filtration is vital and helps to maintain the health of the water source, as the plants and more compact soils hold, uptake, and break down the pollutants before they can pollute the water. Figure 3 displays some examples of healthy banks around the water systems within my watershed. My town conservation committee is responsible for some of this, as one of their BMP goals a few years ago was to assist with and promote more plant growth around local rivers and ponds. They also focused on spreading understanding to citizens of the town about the benefits of keeping water banks well-vegetated (Killingly Conservation Commission, 2022). This is an easy BMP to see within your own watershed, just look for a buildup of plants around the banks of your own water sources.
Figure 3: An image of my backyard brook, the Mashentuck Brook, in the Summer of 2021 to display the large accumulation of vegetation on the banks.
Another management practice that I have seen in my own town is the Stormwater Management Plan (Town of Killingly, 2017). Though the original plan is from 2017, the management practice still makes an impact, and the plans are still followed to this day. The goal of this BMP was to spread awareness to the public of the effects of stormwater runoff and reduce the occurrence of such, involve the public in making changes, mitigate long-term impacts from construction sites and other development projects, and reduce pollutants and runoff due to the actions of the town of Killingly (Town of Killingly, 2017). The 100-page paper outlines BMPs ranging from public plans and education, to permits, higher levels of restrictions, and the maintenance and building of over two thousand catch basins, discharge points, retention ponds, and more (Town of Killingly, 2017). Simply look up your own town’s webpage and search for their stormwater management plans to understand what is going on in your home and how to help yourself. Figure 4 displays an example of a small retention pond within my watershed that is used to collect the stormwater runoff from the road before it runs off into the Mashentuck Brook behind my home. Mine is obviously quite small, though it manages to catch extremely large amounts of water from the road above it, successfully reducing the direct runoff into the brook, and filtering the water so it is cleaner. It is possible to find such ponds close to roads and in areas of significant elevation change.
Figure 4: The above images are of a small retention pond dug directly next to the Mashentuck Brook. This pond collects water, trash, and pollution directly from the road and filters it through the ground before it enters the brook.
The last example within my own watershed of a proper management practice is the protection of natural lands within my town. Currently, there are around eleven total conserved and open-space properties within the town of Killingly, with my own personal watershed bordering two: Hygeia Reservoir and Cat Hollow (Killingly Conservation Commission, 2022). It is possible to access information such as this by searching on your town’s website, or by researching information on local conservation committees and land protection methods. Though these locations have the benefit of town support and protection, it is understood that most of my town’s open land is privately owned, including my own, which can have positive and negative implications (Killingly Planning and Zoning Commission, 2020). On the one hand, people may do what they like with their property, within a certain means, which could lead to improper practices and harm to the watershed. On the other hand, having that level of individual responsibility can be beneficial in teaching people to conserve the land that is their own, which has direct effects on the watershed and water quality. Within my own watershed, the land is all privately owned by both myself, a local farmer, and a few others. Personally, my family and I try not to make large effects on the natural environment, hoping to maintain the health of the already present species and the watershed. By reducing our fertilizer use and allowing the natural growth of the forest, we can promote the health of the watershed by reducing tendency for runoff, reducing construction and impervious groundcover, and providing a large area of filtration for water to pass through before going into the closest water body. In Figure 5, I provide an aerial photo for reference of the privately owned, but protected lands within my watershed.
Figure 5: A Google Earth image of my home, starred, and the surrounding watershed as available from USGS StreamStats. This image shows the large areas of grasslands and covered forests around the water sources (Google, 2022).
Protecting your watershed is necessary to not only maintain the health of yourself and your family, but to care for the species that rely on clean, filtered water for habitats and resources. Water is one of the most important resources available, and it is our job to maintain and protect it from our own wrongdoings. In this article, I highlighted only three BMPs, or best management practices, that I have witnessed within my own watershed, but these are certainly not the only ones. Though riparian zone buildup, stormwater management, and land protection are all necessary and proper BMPs, it is important to do your own research on your town and on your watershed, and find out how the community around you is working to protect both you and the natural world from pollution.
In this article, I will be talking about BPMs that you can find within my watershed. BPM stands for Best Management Practices, these tools protect and can also restore acoustic resources. “Methods that have been determined to be the most effective, practical means of preventing or reducing pollution from nonpoint sources, such as pollutants carried by urban runoff”(Kwon and others, 2021). There are 8 watershed protection tools but in this article, I will only be talking about 3 that you can find within my watershed. But first, the 8 BMPs that I am talking about are land use planning, land conservation, aquatic buffers, better sight design, erosion and sediment control, stormwater best management practices, non-stormwater discharges, and watershed stewardship programs (Kwon and others, 2021). The three that I have found within my watershed are Erosion and Sediment Control, Stormwater Management Practices, and Better Sight Design. There will be photos and descriptions of the locations where these BPMs take place within my watershed.
But first, let me tell you about my watershed. I live in Tappan, New York right outside of New York City. The watershed that I chose to examine for this article was the Sparkill Creek Basin Area. This is a 4.2-mile creek/river that goes through the Lower Hudson Valley and drains into the Hudson River in Piermont New York, (EPA, 2021). The Sparkill Creek Basin on a normal day will be from 1 foot to 5 feet deep depending on where you are along the 4.2-mile stretch. This creek/river fish life is good and consumption of fish is good. In figure 1.1 the green line shows the location where my watershed is located.
Figure 1.1 Area in which you can see the Sparkill Creek highlighted in green to the left of the blue dot (EPA, 2021)
The first BPM that I am going to talk about is Stormwater Management Practices. My watershed is a slow-moving stream that is not very wide and not very deep. As talked about in my last article about the Sparkill Creek watershed, I brought up the changes that had to be made to the creek area in the Downtown Tappan section. A bridge that was made for cars and trucks as seen in figure 2.1, was recently lifted to help with the flooding issue in this area. The original height of this bridge was the main reason why the downtown area of Tappan would flood when there was heavy rainfall. This was an extreme safety hazard for many years in Tappan causing people to evacuate their homes during storms and rendering the local Tappan Fire Dept useless due to flooding. By raising this bridge to allow for the water to easily and swiftly travel through no problem. The old bridge that used to be here was built in 1907 and this rebuild took place in 2019.
Figure 2.1: Oak Tree road Bridge in Tappan New York
The second BMP that I want to talk about is erosion and sediment control. This is happening around the area where they had recently rebuilt the bridge. There is an erosion problem now due to the widening of the bridge. In the area shown in figure 3.1 the grass side of the creek is starting to be washed away slowly and is becoming wider itself. Our local town has come to the conclusion that there is nothing that they can do about it at this point and that they have to just let it happen until it matches up with the span of the bridge, and you can see how wide that is by looking at figure 2.1. The town has also started to fix parts of the retaining wall after so many years of batter from the rushing water.
Figure 3.1 Erosion of the grass area due to rushing water and the building of the new bridge.
The third BPM in my community is better site design. This BPM is currently in the works and will be complete in the next year or two. What I am talking about is a new Tappan Fire House being built right next to the Sparkill Creek and 3 New Parking lots as well. In figure 4.1 you can see what this 14.5 million dollar firehouse will look like and in figure 4.2 you can see the location in which it will be built. This firehouse will be much bigger than the building currently there and many trees and park areas will be destroyed or moved, as of right now the retaining wall seen in figure 4.2 will be rebuilt because the last 10 years it has started to collapse when there is heavy rainfall.
Figure 4.1: New Tappan Fire House set to be built in the next 2 years.
Figure 4.2: The location next to the Sparkill Creek where the new Tappan Fire House will be built.
This project is going to bring big changes to the way water is drained into this watershed and how the trees around the creek are going to help with soaking up water. This will also bring some concern about water pollution from the fire trucks and some other equipment that will be used at this firehouse. They will have to make sure that fuel and other oils will not be drained into this creek basin, due to all the drainage in this parking lot will go into the Sparkill Creek. This project is also going to involve the building of 3 new parking lots that will all drain into the Sparkill Creek. In figure 4.3 you can see where these changes will take place. The changing of the grass area to make it into a parking lot will most likely change the amount of water flowing down the creek due to it not soaking up into the grass.
Figure 4.3: 3 new parking lots will be built with state-of-the-art draining that will drain into the Sparkill Creek, the first lot will be in the grass area on the left, and the other 2 will be on the right where there are 2 lots currently.
BPMs are a key aspect to keeping our local watersheds clean and extremely important in helping protect the life of all the natural resources in your watershed. As you can see my town does care about our waterways by how clean they stay. The three BPMs that I chose are only a few of the many different ways each town can preserve its waterways. Without having all these practices put into place my town would flood uncontrollably, the wildlife around the creek would die and the water itself would not be healthy for fish and other wildlife to live in. These are all methods that are not really noticed by the everyday person that might walk through the Tappan memorial park where Sparkill Creek runs through. The changing of the bridge was huge in keeping flooding down, the new firehouse will be interesting to see how it will affect the area, and I am interested to see if my town will do anything to keep the grass/sandbank of this creek from washing away in the future. It is the smaller things in life that can make big changes.
For any person wanting to know more about their local watershed, knowing what management practices are best to help it are crucial. Watershed Management is essentially managing both land and water practices to both protect and improve the water quality within the watershed in question (DEEP, 2021). For this project we will be looking at the watershed that I live in, The Hammonasset River-Frontal Clinton Harbor Watershed (image 1). Although in reality I live in a smaller watershed within the Hammonasset one, for the sake of acquiring information for the project I chose the larger one. That said, by using the EPA’s web tool StreamStats I was able to find out a lot about the Hammonasset watershed. I found out the total length of all mapped streams within my watershed is about 162 miles and has a drainage area of 48.4 square miles (USGS, 2016). The mean annual precipitation basin average is 50.56 inches and its mean basin elevation is 315 feet (USGS, 2016). The average percentage of impervious area within my local watershed is 18.4 percent and the average soil permeability is 4.625 inches per hour (USGS, 2016). Wetlands within the watershed also made up about 2.91 percent of it (USGS, 2016). Now that I learned the base information about the watershed, I was ready to look into the best management practices I saw within it. This proved to be not as difficult as I had originally thought, as the Hammonasset Watershed includes the Hammonasset Beach State Park. The park is constantly making efforts to keep the waterways that flow through it as healthy as possible. With that said, the three best management practices I saw were: the removal of a large impervious surface, preservation of marshland, and a push for watershed education.
Image 1: The Hammonasset River-Frontal Clinton Harbor Watershed.
One of the biggest management practices I saw was the removal of an impervious surface to allow for better water infiltration into the soil. Where I saw this was at the Salt Meadow Park. The park was formally a small airfield that closed sometime in the 2000s. The land had a lot of pavement in the area, including of course a large runaway. More recently, the land was bought by the town of Madison. After buying it, they decided tp make the old airport into a park, getting rid of most of the pavement and replacing it with a gravel walkway instead (Image 2). By doing this change, water is now allowed to infiltrate the soil much more efficiently. This is important, as too much impervious surface can lead to more runoff into adjacent waterways, which consequently leads to the waterways to more easily flood (US EPA, 2017, sec. 19). Of course, another danger with impervious surfaces is that the runoff from them can be polluted, which will be able to more easily flow into a waterway. This could lead to a much larger area being polluted than would be with the impervious surfaces. This is an important point, as the Salt Meadow Park is right next to salt marshes that are important to the wildlife of the Hammonasset Watershed. If the marsh and its waterways were to be polluted, it could be devastating. Ultimately the removal of the pavement from the park is a net good for the marshes nearby and the watershed overall. The only downside of removing the pavement is on a practicality level. I can guess that it took quite a bit of time and money to get rid of the pavement and place down the gravel. That said, the labor has certainly helped to protect the watershed in the future.
Image 2: At Salt Meadows Park, most of the pavement from the landing strip has been replaced with a small trail of gravel.
Another Management Practice that seems to be at play in my watershed is protection of important watershed land. This can mainly be seen in the Hamonnasset Beach State Park’s heavy focus on protecting its salt marshes and waterways within it. As image 3 shows, the marshes are large and imperative to maintaining the watershed’s health. Marshes, like any other wetland, are important in treating both the quality and quantity of stormwater runoff (O’Keefe and others, 2017, sec. 13). That said, even though the park owns the marshland, it is still a place where hundreds of thousands of people come to camp and enjoy the beach. Making sure people stay off the salt marsh and prevent it from possibly being polluted is important. The Hammonasset Park management team certainly understand this, and consequently have made sure that the marshes be untouched by humans by implementing signage (image 3), as well as having park rangers to keep people from wandering into the marsh and its waterways. Although it is good that the park is conserving the marshes, it does have its problems, namely in practicality. Although the signs and park rangers do a good job of deterring people, if there every is an pollutants in the marsh, it takes the actual staff from the park to go in there and clean it up. Since the marshes are are a pretty wide piece of land, it may prove difficult to maintain the land at a very effective rate. That being said, the signs and the rangers, are an certainly an effective way to keep people from damaging the marshes any further.
Image 3: The Salt Marshes at Hammonasset, signs like the one above are a common sight along the edge of the marsh.
Another great management practice I saw at the Hammonasset park was the it’s push for informing its visitors on the the environment of the park. In this case, the park does a good job of informing visitors on the importance of the salt marshes. Of course, educating people in the importance of the salt marshes can consequently inform them about the watershed. Watershed education does not necessarily need to be incredibly comprehensive, but can be as simple as making people aware that they are living in a watershed, giving insight into what that entails (US EPA, 2017, Sec. 17). Hammonasset Park is very hands on with informing its visitors and even utilizes its staff to do tours of the area for visitors. More so, they use signs all across the park to inform visitors of different aspects of the environment, specifically the salt marshes, as well (Images 4 and 5). This is what I primarily saw while investigating the area. Information signs were everywhere, telling the visitors what a salt marsh is, what animals thrive in the marshes, what restoration projects have been done for the marshes, etc. This information will allow people to understand that these large areas of marsh are not useless, and in fact very important to the watershed they are apart of. Even if the signs are not the most effective (as people do need to stop and read them), they do allow many visitors the chance to learn more about the local environment. Practicality does come into play here, as signs give a lot of information, without the need of a real person there.
Image 4: A sign near Hammonasset’s Salt Marshes. The sign explains a salt marsh restoration project that happened in the past.
Image 5: Another sign at the park that explains
Overall there are many management practices that I saw being implemented in my local watershed. I saw how the town of Madison had converted an old airport into a park, allowing them to remove a paved landing strip (an impermeable cover), which ultimately reducing runoff into the surrounding watershed. Another great management practice I saw was the Hammonasset Beach State Park’s effort to protect the local salt marshes by preventing it from being developed and by consequently keeping the public from accidentally damaging it. Lastly, another management practice I saw that was excellent was Hammonasset’s push for educating people about their local watershed via signs they have around the salt marshes (which play a big part in the watershed). Watershed management can be quite expansive, and each tool of it can vary in impact. But by observing a few good examples of watershed management, it may be able to help us better understand its importance.
USGS, 2016, StreamStats Report for 41.2627, -72.54733, StreamStats Application version 4.3.0, U.S. Geological Survey, accessed April 12, 2022 at https://streamstats.usgs.gov/ss/.
WatershedWatch 