Water Shed

Definition: A watershed is all the land area that drains into a particular body of water

• Edwards’ Aquifer → Hill Country

Characteristics:

• Area & Length

• Slope

• Soils

• Land cover/use - boundaries (local maximum)

How do the characteristics of a watershed affect the way water moves through it?

• Area & Length: How much water there is, how long it takes to move, materials carried by water

• Slope: How quickly water drains, which mainly affects erosion

• Soils: Where/how the water drains, amounts of erosion

  • Groundwater, how much filtered, how much runs over the top as runoff

• Land cover/use: Where, how, how quickly water will drain, materials carried in the water

  • Parking lots and houses bad (impermeable surface - water cannot pass through)

  • Driving - oil & antifreeze & litter will end up in body of water, trash waterfall at Boggy Creek

Ecosystem Services

• 10-15 trillion dollars, more than global economy put together

• Provisioning services - products obtained from ecosystems (timber, food, medicine)

• Cultural services - nonmaterial benefits from ecosystem services (education, religion, beauty) - activities like swimming outside

• Regulating services - benefits obtained by regulation of ecosystem processes (climate regulation, pest control, pollution, pollination), effects of things being alive

• Supporting services - services necessary for production of other ecosystem services (primary productivity nutrient recycling, biodiversity maintenance), cause for life to keep on living

Functions of Healthy Watershed

• Provisioning services - fish & food, nutrient cycling & food, timber

• Cultural services - recreational activities, education

• Regulating services - erosion control, water filtration, flood control, water storage, soil formation (when water percolates through soil, soil filters), wildlife movement, carbon storage

• Supporting services - soil formation, increased biodiversity, water cycle, algae from photosynthesis, wildlife corridors

Boggy Creek

• Forest - carbon sequestration/storage (supporting)

• Open land → industrial zone - cultural services, regulating services (pest control), construction, impermeable surface of concrete, water will runoff, moves fast on top of soil, cause erosion and flash flooding, chemicals & oil (surface pollution runoff)

• Boggy Creek trail, 183 in the way and loud (not good for animals), creates some habitat (Barton swallows)

• Prevent flooding because creek is wider

  • Channelization - shallow and wide, fish can’t live in super shallow, oxygen goes way down because it can’t stay in hot water, fertilizers and slow, algae good! (make oxygen), harm to biodiversity

• Fertilizer and pesticides from houses, algae blooms - eutrophication - runoff goes into big scale, when all creeks go into Colorado River → ocean, nutrients have major effect

• Farming/excessive lawn maintenance → nutrient pollution

  • Chesapeake Bay in rural Virginia, New York (big farmland)

    • Dead zone takes up most of the bay and heavily affected by sediment erosion

  • Mississippi River

  • Gulf Dead Zone (40 miles)

  • Creates dead zones, no oxygen, nothing alive

• Dam in Boggy Creek

  • Holds more water, artificial regulating service, prevent wildlife movement

  • Salmon - Columbia River Basin, damming can disrupt or eliminate movement or separation of populations of aquatic species

• Poor agricultural practices and increased erosion can lead to increased sediment pollution

• Dirt builds up, affect plants and animals are evicted by dirt on the seafloor

• Hydrodynamics: disrupt benithic (inverbed) habitats due to excess sedimentation

• Increased water clarity and decreased flooding can allow non-native species to establish populations and outcompete native species