Mill Creek Watershed Association

03/19/2024

In many cases, dumpsters are a threat to our stormwater because they are positioned near storm drains. If your business utilizes a dumpster, please place it away from storm drains to help protect our water supply.

03/19/2024

Ok so need to go here!

03/03/2024

The Mill Creek Watershed Association and the Cane Ridge Community Club are sponsoring a speaker tomorrow evening at the Cane Ridge Community Club monthly Community Dinner and meeting. Please Join us at 6:00pm and Welcome Dr.Chris Vanags, an Hydrologist for Vanderbilt University. He will talk to us about the karst topography found in the Cane Ridge area.
Please joins us for dinner and a great discussion of our natural topography!Below is Dr. Vanags short bio.

Chris Vanags is a hydrologist and soil physicist at Vanderbilt University where he serves as Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and as the Director of the Peabody Research Office in the College of Education. Growing up in Atlanta, Ga Chris attended the Georgia Institute of Technology and later the University of Georgia where he would receive his B.S. in Geology, and his M.S. in Soil Science. There he studied soil formation on barrier islands off the southeastern coast of the U.S. While presenting this research at an international conference in Charlotte, Chris stayed up all night talking with an Australian researcher who later invited him to do his PhD at the University of Sydney. Through this poorly thought-out arrangement, Chris went on to study groundwater dynamics in the middle of nowhere, in Southeast Australia. After finishing in 2007, Chris settled down at Vanderbilt where he studies groundwater-surface water dynamics and specifically how to sense things that are difficult to conceptualize. Based on his love for exploration and research, he also started several research-based programs for K-12 students, which have been expanded across about country and which later laid the foundation for several international educational reform projects in the Middle East and two potential expansions in South Korea and Japan.

02/27/2024

02/27/2024

The Mill Creek Watershed Association will once again be joining the Nationwide W**d Wrangle Event! Please join us Saturday March 2 at 9:00am until 12:00pm at the Orchard Bend Park Parking Lot. We will get you oriented and walk a short distance to the wrangling site. Please wear old clothes you do not care about, solid closed toes shoes or boots that you can get muddy. Bring a reusable water bottle and we will have a water station for refilling your bottle. Tools will be provided as will gloves. Sign up on Hands on Nashville https://www.hon.org/ . Go to the website, click on Volunteer and go to the calendar. Scroll to the date March 2 and click on Mill Creek Watershed Association's W**d Wrangle Event and register! We hope to see you there.

02/20/2024

In any city, trees, like people, need space. In a new study, researchers at Columbia University found that street trees protected by guards that stopped passersby from trampling the surrounding soil absorbed runoff water more quickly than trees in unprotected pits. Comparing the infiltration rate of street trees with and without guards in Manhattan's Morningside Heights neighborhood, the researchers found that trees in protected pits absorbed water six times faster on average than tree pits without guards -- 3 millimeters versus .5 millimeters per minute. During heavy storms, the aging network of sewers is unable to keep up with the combined flow of wastewater from streets and homes. As a result, heavy flows are often released directly into nearby rivers, raw sewage and all. To reduce these combined sewer overflows the city has turned to 'green infrastructure,' or engineering solutions that harness trees and other vegetation to drain the built landscape.

02/20/2024

Beautiful Mill Creek in February. Lovely ripples along the Mill Creek Greenway in Cane Ridge and a vernal pool with a chorus of spring peepers. What a wonderful day for a walk!

02/05/2024

Do you know how valuable wetlands are? Did you know that wetlands can store up to 1.5 MILLION gallons of floodwater, improve water quality, and provide habitat to fish and wildlife?
Happy World Wetlands Day!

12/03/2023

The tree-of-heaven (Ailanthus altissima), also known as Chinese sumac, is one of the most detrimental invasive species—an organism that expands out of its native range and dominates elsewhere—plaguing North America. Native to China and Taiwan, Ailanthus was purposefully brought to the US in the late 1700s. Unfortunately, it has steadily spread since then, and it now devastates native ecosystems from coast to coast.

Read more about Ailanthus and what you can do to help manage it ➡️ https://bit.ly/3uwHlnm

📸 Doug McGrady