Buck Creek has been an integral part of Springfield's history. From supplying fresh water to a growing community to providing early power to more than 65 mills along its banks through Springfield, Buck Creek was the lifeblood of early Springfield. While a significant portion of its corridor is now dedicated to parks and recreation, recreational enhancements of Buck Creek envisioned by John and Kevin Loftis, Springfield Conservancy District, and National Trail Parks and Recreation District, will once again connect the community to the creek. Modification of four lowhead dams to enable water recreation and downstream navigation is the centerpiece of this vision.
Modifications of the lowhead dams for recreational purposes offers an excellent opportunity to study their impact on water quality and quality of stream habitat. The Buck Creek Educational Corridor, part of Wittenberg’s Center for Civic and Urban Engagement and its “Renewing the Core and the Creek” initiative, is an instrumented five-mile section of Buck Creek and its tributary Beaver Creek. Current instrumentation includes a weather station,
a stream gaging station, and two water quality stations.
The objectives of the Buck Creek Educational Corridor are to:
You can download a fact sheet with additional information on the Buck Creek Educational Corridor from here.
Stage-Discharge Calculator
2009 Student Activities on Buck Creek
The Center for Civic and Urban Engagement (CCUE) is supporting the work of two student interns on Buck Creek as part of its "Renewing the Core and the Creek" initiative.
Kelly Shaw '11, a major in geology and minor in political science, is collecting baseline data on water qualityat each of the dam sites in order to augment the data being logged continuously along the project reach. The parameters she is measuring include nitrates, phosphates, chlorides, and hardness. Kelly is using a Hach DREL/2010 Advanced Water Quality Laboratory and the DR/2010 Spectrophotometer for her analyses.
Chad Rigsby '11, a major in biology, is studying stream macroinvertebrates upstream and downstream of each of the dam sites. The objectives of his work is to understand the impact of the lowhead dams on the macroinvertebrate community. For each lowhead dam, he is sampling the pooled area immediately upstream of the dam, an area further upstream that is unimpacted by the dam, characterized as the first riffle environment immediately upstream of the pooled area, and the downstream recovery riffle. He is using OEPA standard operating procedures for qualitative sampling and analysis of aquatic organisms which will make data comparable to other streams in Ohio. Chad's data will form a baseline dataset characterizing the condition of Beaver Creek and Buck Creek prior to lowhead dam modification or removal.
Daniel Brennan '10, with support from a Student Development Board Summer Research Grant, is installing a gaging station on Beaver Creek, just upstream of its confluence with Buck Creek. He will develop a stage-discharge rating curve for Beaver Creek in order for us to determine relative contributions to downstream flow from USACE releases from C.J. Brown Reservoir and Beaver Creek.
Aaron Evelsizor '11, with support from the Floyd R. Nave Endowment Award, is refining the QHEI determinations and doing detailed clast counts at each of the dam sites. He is positioning his analyses relative to the engineered plans in order to provide pre-modification baseline data on the physical habitat and channel bed properties for comparison to post-modification conditions.
Instrumentation along the Buck Creek Educational Corridor was selected to allows students and instructors to study the relation between rainfall, streamflow, and water quality. The Weather Station is a Vaisala Weather Transmitter WXT520 located on top of Wittenberg’s Science Building. It provides wind speed, wind direction, barometric pressure, relative humidity, liquid precipitation, and air temperature. Barometric pressure is absolute, not currently adjusted to sea level.
The Stream Gaging Station is located in existing USGS/USACE gaging station housing west of the Plum Street bridge. It measures changes in water level, which eventually will be converted to stream discharge as well as depth at each of the recreational sites. The latter information will be of interest to kayakers and canoeists as it will control the hydraulics of flow through constrictions at the recreational sites.
Two Water Quality Stations are located upstream and downstream of the first two lowhead dams that will be modified in order to assess the quality of water as it changes through the reach as a function of the dam modifications. The water quality monitors provide temperature, pH, conductivity, oxidation-reduction potential (ORP), dissolved oxygen, and turbidity data.
