College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Engaging Students
Search for Chronic Disease Risk Factors in
Horses Leads to Clues about Prevention
Bringing New Life to an Eroding Stream
Value-added Soybeans to Save Money and Environment
Expanding the Learning Experience
Crossing Traditional Boundaries of Science
To Find Health Solutions
Hobby-size Planes May Be Future of
Early Warning System
Improving Local Economies Through Agritourism
Incentive Payments May Reduce Phosphorus Pollution
Protecting Milk’s Flavor and Nutritional Value
Finding a Healthful and Environmentally Friendly Use For Peanut Skins
Supporting Virginia’s Expanding Wine Industry
Virginia Tech Reaches Top 10 in Agricultural Research
Entrepreneurship Education Puts Business Owners in the Express Lane
E-learning Option for Place-bound Professionals
Financial Planning – From the Farm to the Household
New Graduate Program to Train Faculty in Agricultural Education Fields
Farmers’ Markets from Diverse Communities Benefit from Sharing
Families, Food, and Fun
Developing Disease-free Mosquitoes
Mites Make Right in Honduras – or Not?
Help for the Hippos of Zambia
Bringing New Life to an Eroding Stream
A plan to restore Stroubles Creek may offer a model for improving streams across the country
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| The advantage of working with Stroubles Creek, which is near Virginia Tech’s campus, is students and researchers can use the stream as an outdoor laboratory. Along with her students and colleagues, Wynn is monitoring erosion rates using a submerged jet test device, the latest development in in erosion monitoring technology.
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In 1908, the Town of Blacksburg, Va., was only a few square blocks. Virginia Tech, then called Virginia Polytechnic Institute, consisted of a handful of buildings and agricultural fields. Stroubles Creek, a freshwater stream that emerges from natural springs on the northern part of town, flowed nine miles through the town and the middle of campus with little disturbance before discharging into the New River.
Today, a century of urbanization and agricultural development has led to the deterioration of Stroubles Creek, which now joins hundreds of other streams across the country classified as “impaired” under the Clean Water Act. In fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that more than 40 percent of assessed waters in the United States are impaired, primarily because of non-point source pollution. Theresa “Tess” Wynn, assistant professor of biological systems engineering, hopes not only to reverse the degradation of this small, 14,000-acre watershed in Blacksburg but also to find better ways to improve streams throughout the country.
| “Because certain macroinvertebrates are particularly sensitive to pollution, you know you have a problem when these insects disappear,” Wynn explains. |
“The United States is spending approximately $1 billion each year on stream restoration, but much of this is form-based design that often doesn’t work and doesn’t consider the long-term implications of land use and climate change,” Wynn explains.
The reasons to improve stream restoration techniques are not solely economic, though. Because streams flow into rivers and other large waterways, improving the small streams also improves the entire watershed. Roughly 80 percent of all stream miles within a watershed are small “headwater” streams. These streams are heavily affected by events taking place on the land around them. Environmental concerns such as this not only motivate Wynn’s research but also provide a starting point for it.
“Concerns about Stroubles Creek began when monitoring by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality showed that the benthic macroinvertebrates – little insects that live on the bottom of a stream and are good indicators of water quality – were suffering from water pollution,” Wynn says. “Because certain macroinvertebrates are particularly sensitive to pollution, you know you have a problem when these insects disappear.”
Gene Yagow and Brian Benham with the Center for Watershed Studies at Virginia Tech and the Department of Biological Systems Engineering conducted a study of Stroubles Creek that determined
the source of the water-quality problem was excess sediment
from construction in Blacksburg and the stream channel itself. This study produced a total maximum daily load (TMDL) that specified the maximum amount of sediment Stroubles Creek can tolerate
without violating state waterquality standards.
Yagow and Benham worked with Wynn; Tamin Younos, director of the Virginia Water Resources Research Center; and a committee of concerned local citizens, government staff, andVirginia Tech faculty to develop a plan for improving the health of Stroubles Creek. “We all know that urbanization plays a key role in the degradation of Stroubles Creek,” Wynn says. “During storms, water travels from asphalt pavement directly to the stream, bypassing the natural storage the soil provides. This increased flow rips the channel apart.”
The boom in agricultural development near Stroubles Creek over the past century has also added to the problems it faces. “Imagine a 1,000-pound dairy cow trampling along a stream bank,” Wynn says. “The amount of pressure the cow is putting on the bank in pounds per square inch will erode the stream even further over time.”
These issues are not unique to Stroubles Creek, but theapproach that Wynn and her colleagues are taking is. Usingan almost $200,000, two-year grant from the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, they will split 1.8 miles of the main channel and a tributary into three sections and apply different stream restoration techniques to each one to examine the effectiveness of common techniques. This restoration effort aims to reduce 242 tons of sediment per year, as well as significant amounts of phosphorus and nitrogen from the Stroubles Creek Basin.
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