Reintroduction: Watershed Stewardship

Welcome to the reopening of my Saunders Woods Preserve Blog documenting the work I am conducting on the area for my Virginia Tech Graduate School classes. In summer of 2022 I created this blog for my Biodiversity Stewardship course which was a very successful endeavor, and the posts from that time can be seen below. This fall (2023), I am continuing this blog for my Watershed Stewardship course. For this class, as the name implies, I will be shifting my focus to some extent to the watershed as opposed to the biodiversity and ecology of the preserve. There will be some minor overlap and references to previous work in certain posts between the two classes but I will try to keep that to a minimum. Saunders Woods Preserve is home to a small stream, a part of a micro watershed, that is unnamed. A little research, however, revealed it has been labeled as Schuylkill Tributary 00920. I will likely be referring to it as the Saunders Stream and Saunders Watershed. The headwaters of the stream is located in Saunders but a majority of its length on the way to the Schuylkill is actually not in Saunders, however. It is only a little over two miles long and leads to the larger 135 mile Schuylkill River, which flows from Pottsville through Philadelphia and then meets the Delaware River which leads to the Delaware Bay and then the Atlantic Ocean. While the watershed of the tributary stream I am focusing upon is likely only one or two square miles and lacking basically any data, the Schuylkill’s watershed is around 2,000 sq mi. Looking forward to discovering some more knowledge on this watershed and publishing it right here throughout the semester.