ENGR 0715 - Engineering Applications for Society
Spring 2008 Projects
Soil & Water Modeling of Schenley Park Watershed
Community Partner: Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy
Team:
Danielle Pooler, Nicole Hoehn, Anca Pelinescu, and Sam McNulty
Problem Statement:
Our team worked with Erin Copeland and the Pittsburgh Parks
Conservatory (PPC) to gather information and help prepare for the future
restoration of the Panther Hollow Watershed in Schenley Park. The
construction of roads above the hollow and a general lack of maintenance
have caused the area to erode over the past seventy years, resulting in a
large amount of sediment traveling through the watershed and settling in
the lake. Our job was to find out how this sediment was traveling through
the system and how the area has changed over time. For our project, we continued the research of previous
students, collecting data and measurements along Panther Hollow Run.
Specifically, our goal was to evaluate the flow of sediment through the
watershed and the rate of erosion of the area by analyzing the amount of
suspended solids in water samples, performing multiple cross sectional
measurements, and examining old orthophotographs and topography maps from
the United States Geographical Society to see how the area has changed
over time. The information we collected will help the PPC determine how
often they must dredge the lake, and helped to build a foundation of data for
their future restoration project of the Panther Hollow Watershed.
