What is a Watershed Webquest?

Name: Christine Frye

Access the following link and answer the questions:

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watershed.html

1. What is a watershed? A watershed is the area of land where all of the water that falls in it and
drains off of it goes to a common outlet.

2. Watersheds can vary in size. True/False True

3. What type of watershed is shown in the map? National 8-digit hydrolic units

4. The word watershed is sometimes used interchangeably with drainage basin or catchment.

5. Ridges and hills that separate two watersheds are called the drainage divide.

6. What does watershed consist of? Surface water, streams, wetlands, lakes, and reservoirs.

7. Larger watersheds contain many smaller watersheds. It all depends on the outflow point..

8. What is the outflow point? Watershed for the outflow location

9. Why are watersheds important? Stream flow and the water quality are affected by things
happening above ground.
1

A Watershed is a precipitation collector:

1. Name 6 factors that determine how much of the streamflow will flow by the monitoring site?
Precipitation, evaporation, storage, infiltration, transpiration, and water use by people.
2. What is the greatest factor controlling streamflow? Precipitation

3. The amount of water that will infiltrate (soak in over time) depends on which four characteristics?
Soil characteristics, soil saturation, slope of land, and land cover.

4. Water from rainfall returns to the atmosphere largely through evaporation.

5. The root systems of plants absorb water from the surrounding soil in various amounts through the
process of transpiration.

6. Storage store water and increase the amount of water that evaporates and infiltrates.

River Basins of N.C.:

http://wwweenorthcarolina.org/riverbasins-interactive.html
Choose one of the NC. River Basins and list out 10 facts about the one you
investigate. Also include one picture that best represents a main feature of
the River Basin.
White Oak River Basin
1. Contains the city of Jacksonville and the U.S. Marine Corps base at
Camp Lejeune.
2. It gets its name from the White Oak River, 48-mile river that spills into
Bogue Sound.
3. Forest and wetlands cover almost half the basin.

4. More than 80,000 acres of the Croatan National Forest lie within the
White Oak River Basin.
5. Home to rare and unusual insect-eating plants like the legally
protected Venus flytrap, pitcher plants, bladderworts, butterworts, and
sundews.
6. The White Oak River Basin includes an area known as the Onslow Bight
that stretches from the lower Northeast Cape Fear River to the Pamlico
River.
7. It has 320 total miles of streams and rivers.
8. It has 140,104 total acres of estuary.
9. It has 129 miles of coastline.
10.

There are 6 counties within the basin.