Video, Lessons & Colgan Creek Resources


Videos

Check out these videos of the restoration work, taken by Sydney Temple, Questa Engineering Corporation.

Lessons

A Resource Guide for teachers in the Colgan Creek watershed (pdf): This curriculum guide offers some educational activities designed to increase awareness of Colgan Creek. It seeks to answer a few questions.

  • Where is the creek in relation to students’ homes and schools, their travel routes and places they often visit?

  • Why are people working to restore the creek, and what does the restoration involve? What is a healthy creek?

  • What can students, and their families, do to improve the health of Colgan Creek?

The lessons include a variety of materials found on the Internet, and some designed especially for Colgan Creek. 

Colgan Creek Tour – From Headwaters to the Laguna de Santa Rosa (pdf | powerpoint): A pictorial tour of the Colgan Creek watershed, showing familiar landmarks and sections of the creek.

Colgan Creek Restoration (pdf | powerpoint): The story of how and why Colgan Creek is being restored.

Restoration Examples (pdf | powerpoint): A brief description of restoration methods, with before and after pictures.

Resources

  • The Altered Laguna The Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation … developed a conceptual framework to address the following goals: 1) Improve our understanding of the Laguna system for basin scale planning and management; 2) Gather and analyze available data; 3) Identify data gaps, appropriate system indicators, monitoring regimes, and restoration targets; and 4) Specify further modeling efforts focused on the watershed. The impetus to this process is the project’ s important role in launching the Laguna Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) study to address water quality concerns, and to ensure that the appropriate watershed-scale scope is used for the TMDL-related work.

  • Modeling river flows and sediment dynamics for the Laguna de Santa Rosa watershed in Northern California. C. Potter and S. Hiatt. Abstract: The nonpoint source pollution model Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was applied to understand management options that may improve water quality in the Laguna de Santa Rosa watershed in Sonoma County, California. Surface water quality in the Laguna watershed has been significantly impaired over recent years, as natural land cover has been urbanized or converted to agricultural uses. We first generated new maps of land cover and major land uses from satellite and airborne imagery for the watershed

  • Biodiversity Action Plan, 2010. Priority Actions to Preserve Biodiversity in Sonoma County.
    “The objective of this plan is to answer the following questions regarding Sonoma County’s natural heritage: What do we have? What are the threats? What can we do to reduce risk of losing our biodiversity? This plan is a resource for technical experts, land managers, funders, policy makers and interested citizens regarding the status and natural dynamics of local ecosystems and current threats to biodiversity. It advances a set of non-regulatory actions grounded in a collaborative multi-stakeholder approach to maintain biodiversity in Sonoma County for generations to come.”

Information about Colgan Creek

Creek Care Guides

Organizations

  • Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation: Restore, Conserve & Inspire: Nurturing a Healthy Laguna.  Founded in 1989, the Laguna Foundation is a place-based organization focused on the Laguna de Santa Rosa, a Wetland of International Importance.

  • The Russian River Watershed Association is a coalition of eleven cities, counties and special districts in the Russian River Watershed that have come together to coordinate regional programs for clean water, fisheries restoration and watershed enhancement.

  • STRAW  Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed

More Information