Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Great Website!

Check out this site!
http://www.dcr.virginia.gov/soil_&_water/index.shtml
Here's a sample of what you can find there...
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Ever heard of a "watershed"?
Although everyone lives in a watershed, most people don't know the actual meaning of the word. Put simply, a watershed is all the land that drains into a given body of water. This body of water can be a creek, pond, river or ocean. Generally speaking, the larger the body of water, the larger its watershed. The Chesapeake Bay watershed, for example, covers 64,000 square miles and drains from six states including 60 percent of Virginia.
This map depicts the major rivers' watersheds in the Old Dominion. One thing all of these watersheds have in common is people, and where you have people, you have land-disturbance. When people alter land - to farm, to build, to landscape, for transportation, etc. - they must ensure that changes don't cause runoff pollution for other people or plants and animals downstream that depend on clean, usable water.
The technical term for this type of pollution is nonpoint source pollution (NPS), and it's a thread you'll find common to nearly every page in the soil and water conservation section of DCR's website. Regardless of the watershed in which you live - and each watershed has unique NPS pollution problems - there are many ways all of us, from farmers to elementary school children, can prevent such pollution to keep Virginia's creeks, rivers and bays clean and productive. Click here to learn simple ways to reduce the threat of NPS pollution and make Virginia an even better place to live.
If you'd like to learn more about Virginia's watersheds, there's plenty of material available from DCR to help you promote watershed awareness. A 10-minute video, Watershed Connections, brochure, large poster of the state's watersheds, kids' conservation activities booklet, bumper stickers and watershed yellow pages for the major river basins are yours for the asking. Just call toll-free 1-877-42WATER or your local DCR watershed office. Click here to download a copy of Watershed Connections, a brochure that details ways you can help your watershed (PDF, 500K). To learn about the more technical aspects of hydrologic unit delineation and notation, please click here.
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Also look into the adopt a stream program (link at the bottom of the page) among others for ways in which you can help the James River Watershed!

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