Southwest Virginia's Big Laurel Creek - Whitetop Laurel Creek Watershed Study

  The invasive plants, animals and diseases that are of most concern in the Big Laurel Creek – Whitetop Laurel Creek watershed are major concerns across southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee, USA.     These non-native invasive species (NNIS) are: Plants ·          Kudzu ·          Autumn Olive ·          Tree-of-Heaven Animals and Diseases ·          Wooly Adelgid ·          Chestnut Blight   Plants .   The three plant NNIS are mainly found in the developed (urbanized) and agricultural floodplain (middle section) of the Big Laurel Creek – Whitetop Laurel Creek watershed but are a concern because of the high probability of further spread due to human activity, and the ability of each NNIS to outcompete native species in almost all the watersh...

The equipment and tools for watershed assessment and analysis in the field are numerous and varied, and used by biologists, geomorphologists, engineers, and other related professions.  Common tools are measuring devices, from simple items such as handheld surveying equipment and measuring rods to more modern items like cameras, unmanned aerial drones, and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) remote sensing technology. For my analysis of the Big Laurel Creek – Whitetop Laurel Creek watershed, I have walked the watershed and photographed key locations that will be addressed in a future blog post.  In addition, I conducted the hydrologic analysis for the Mapping and Delineating the Big Laurel Creek – Whitetop Laurel Creek Watershed blog post on 28 September 2025 using three resources available on-line for watershed visualization.  This blog post will describe the procedure that I followed for that visualization.     Figure 1.  Visualization of the the B...