Centennial Campus and other sites in the greater Raleigh area

Rich McLaughlan (NCSU) has looked at event-based sediment and water (no chemistry) discharge from 3 small catchments on Centennial campus, which are tributaries to Walnut Creek. The total area of the three catchments is about 100 acres. Had a project at NCSU’s Lake Wheeler station monitoring discharge from an ephemeral channel with a 20-30 acre watershed, but the project is not ongoing.

Other urban watersheds in the Raleigh area include Swift Creek and Crabtree Creek. Swift Creek drains the city of Cary and flows first into Lake Wheeler and then into Lake Benson (backup water supply). It is a strictly managed urban watershed with riparian buffers and controls and a high priority watershed for protection. There are USGS gages on Swift Creek but no actual projects at this site. According to the NC DENR Office of Non-Point Source Management, Crabtree Creek is the site of an urban planning demonstration project which received 319 funding in 1999 to evaluate the effectiveness of constructed wetlands, bio-retension, storm filtersand streambank restoration BMPs as well as planning techniques such as reduced pavement widths, reduced densities in sensitive areas and buffers on reducing the impacts of urban development on water quality. The site is contained within the City of Cary and is planned for a neo-urban development that would create more than 80 percent impervious surface area within a 400-acre watershed. The study was designed as a paired watershed study with a forested control, and two developing watersheds – one with BMPs and one with no BMPs.