Welcome to Cacapon Institute's Interactive Maps! These Map web pages
are currently under construction, but in the next few months we will bring you
interactive land use maps of all of our study areas, as well as photographs, summary and
comparative statistics, graphs and tables to help you
learn more about your watersheds, and about how certain land uses affect our
water quality.
Try surfing around a bit and let us know what you think! We need your
feedback.
Fair warning: Some of these
maps have fairly large file sizes and may take a few moments to display.
Click on a study area in the map below to learn more, or check out the Cacapon
Geology map or Cacapon Floodplain map.
The 178 km long Cacapon River, a tributary of the Potomac
River, has a drainage area of 680 sq miles, about 7% of the Potomac drainage
upstream of Virginia. The entire watershed contains only two incorporated
communities and no heavy industry. Seventy-nine percent of the land in the
Cacapon watershed is forested, while 19% is agricultural; the remaining 2%
consists of residential development, barren lands and water (Constantz et. al.,
1993).
Cacapon River Watershed
Lost and North Rivers Water Quality Study
The major focus of our work presently is a research project seeking to determine
the effect of land use practices and non-point
source pollution on rivers and watersheds. The project focuses especially,
but not only, on farming practices and land development. The Lost River
watershed (headwaters of the Cacapon) contains the majority of our study sites because of the heavy
concentration of poultry houses, and
hence the heavy application of nutrient-rich poultry litter as fertilizer, in that watershed and because there is
increasing land development. The North River watershed (the major
tributary of the Cacapon) has about 1/4 the number of poultry houses (and less
intensive application of fertilizer) seen in the
Lost and provides a valuable comparison watershed.
These studies were designed to answer three questions: 1- are
nutrients applied to the basin's agricultural soils entering the river; 2- do
streams with different land use characteristics have different nutrient and
bacterial concentrations; and 3- what are peak loadings contributed by each
stream and by each watershed as a whole
We want to point out that it is not our intention to "pick on"
agriculture. However, there are serious concerns over the impacts of
intensive agriculture of various kinds on water quality. Our studies are
designed to determine what the real impacts are to help concerned citizens and
government agencies make informed decisions.
We study mainly the effects of
agriculture because it is the main land use besides forest in the Lost and North
River watersheds. Residences are scattered at low density
throughout these watersheds. No municipal water and sewer facilities, large
industrial point sources or large towns exist in the Lost and North river
basins. The vast majority of land that is not in agriculture is
forested. These factors make these watersheds an ideal place to study the
effects of agricultural non-point source pollution without many of the
complicating variables like cities and point sources that are found in other
watersheds.
