REU: Interdisciplinary Watershed Studies

2007 was the fifth year of an interdisciplinary summer internship program to study watersheds at the College of William and Mary. Funding is from the National Science Foundation's Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. Each year we select 10 undergraduates from across the country to participate in student research projects mentored by faculty in environmental geology, biology, sociology and economics. The cohort of students works with W&M faculty mentors to determine the impacts of changing watershed land use in scientific and socio-economic contexts. Students complete research projects on the 16-ha Lake 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 are 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 are used to determine the current direction and strength of population and market forcing functions. Access to a richly detailed history of the Colonial Williamsburg region allows us to develop a timeline of changes in watershed land use as a context for analysis of watershed structure and function.