Human Impacts On The Water Quality Of The Pasquotank Watershed (Invited)

Most people don't know that they could be contributing to adverse water quality changes right in their own backyards. How? Well because, we all live in watersheds, an area that drains to a common waterway. In order to determine how development, farmlands and water treatment plants affect water quality, we visited various locations near agriculture sites, urban development and waste treatment facilities along the Pasquotank River and protected and agriculture influenced sites in the Great Dismal Swap (Washington Ditch Pond, Lake Drummond and Merchants Mill Pond) in Southeastern Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina. At each location we measured pH, temperature, water clarity, apparent and true color, Dissolved Oxygen (DO), specific conductivity, turbidity, zooplankton abundance, and the amount of chlorophyll a. We found that as we moved down the river into increasing agriculture and development the water clarity decreased and conductivity increased. When we moved towards the city and away from the swamp headwaters, dissolved color decreased and the pH increased. The lowest clarity was found in water off of downtown Elizabeth City; we also noted that the highest chlorophyll readings were located at the sewage treatment plant outflow site. The Washington Ditch pond, that bordered agriculture, had lower DO, color and conductivity than the more protected Lake Drummond. Merchants Mill Pond had pH, conductivity and color that fell between the other two swamp sites but had the lowest DO of any site sampled. Additional water quality results supported our initial hypothesis that the quality of the water decreased with the extent of land use. This is a student conducted project by rising freshmen and sophomores mentored by the first author and conducted as part of the NSF funded Watershed Watch Program.