REU Site: Interdisciplinary Watershed Studies at the College of William and Mary

College Of William And Mary, Williamsburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

This REU Site will create a summer research program encompassing the scope of watershed science conducted at the campus environmental field laboratory. Each year eight outstanding undergraduates from across the country and two from William and Mary will be selected to participate in student research projects mentored by faculty in environmental geology, biology, sociology and economics. The cohort of students will work with W&M faculty mentors to determine the impacts of changing watershed land use in scientific and socio-economic contexts. Students will complete research projects on the 16-ha Lane Matoaka (the oldest man-made impoundment in Virginia) and in streams and associated uplands of the two watersheds in which the college owns property. Investigations of current hydrogeologic and ecological status in the two watersheds will be completed by determining stream discharge characteristics and responses to stormflows, spatial variation in water quality, lake-wide budgets for water, sediment and nutrients, and population/community structure in aquatic and terrestrial portions of the watersheds. Because the status of the watershed systems is the result of historical changes in land use, sociologic and economic examinations of residents' perception of development, environmental protection and water and property rights will be used to determine the current direction and strength of population and market forcing functions. Access to a richly detailed history of the Colonial Willliamsburg region will allow development of a timeline of changes in watershed land use as a context for analysis of watershed structure and function.