Shoreline stabilization project at Chickahominy Riverfront Park expected to finish in April dailypress.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailypress.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The critical moments happened on trips to the Chesapeake Bay near Tangier Island, the Rappahannock River below Fones Cliffs or the pristine Occupacia Creek in Essex County.
At some point in those educational journeysâled by Bill Portlock for 40 yearsâthe motor would be turned off or the paddling would stop. Thatâs the moment students young and old were most likely to experience a striking moment of personal connection to nature.
âThe focus in those moments is just to drift and listen to the sounds being made,â Portlock said. âAn eagle might soar in, or something similarly spectacular might happen, or students will feel something special in simply witnessing the quiet and peaceful nature of a marsh or the look of the wind on the water in the Bay.
Since 2016, the Chesapeake Conservancy has pioneered the use of highly detailed images of landscapes taken from low-flying airplanes to pinpoint where conservation measures can best be deployed to clean up streams.
Those high-resolution images â down to a scale of 1 square meter â can pinpoint the locations of pollution hotspots, such as stormwater runoff from farms and developed land, and sites with bare, erosion-prone streambanks. Lidar (light-detection and ranging) technology uses a pulsed laser to measure distances and show elevation changes and steep slopes.
Volunteers plant a streamside buffer along Elk Creek in Centre County, PA, as part of a ârapid delistingâ project to get the stream removed from the state list of impaired waterbodies. (Peter Turcikâ/âChesapeake Conservancy)