Mountain Stream Monitoring - Allens CreekProject Overview
Located within the Waynesville Watershed, the headwaters of Allens Creek flow through the Great Smoky Mountains near Waynesville, NC. The creek flows down the watershed and into the Waynesville Reservoir, a 50-acre man-made lake created by a dam on the creek.
Students and faculty at Western Carolina University's Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management routinely use the watershed as a natural laboratory for testing classroom theory against real environmental conditions.
Recently, a NexSens standalone data logging system was installed along Allens Creek to interface with water quality and level sensors, helping to broaden the scope of research within the watershed.
System Description
Along the bank of Allens Creek, an angled trench was dug out to house the PVC deployment pipes. The pipes were strapped together and mounted to bedrock, ensuring strong resistance against debris and providing a fixed reference point for the water level sensor.
University researchers chose a YSI 6920 multi-parameter sonde to monitor temperature, conductivity, pH, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity in the stream. An OTT PS1 pressure transducer was used for water level measurements. Each instrument is housed in an independent PVC deployment pipe so that level measurement data is unaffected by periodic sonde maintenance.
Nearby, a NexSens iSIC data logger interfaces with both instruments, periodically interrogating the instruments and storing the data to its internal memory. The data logger is powered by an 8.5 A-Hr battery stored inside the NEMA 4X enclosure. A 20-Watt solar panel charges the battery.
Students and faculty periodically visit the site to collect data and perform routine maintenance on the YSI sonde. When collected, NexSens iChart software automatically posts data to the NexSens web datacenter, WQData. This openly accessible datacenter provides researchers with a convenient means of viewing and analyzing recent and historical data. 
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