Duck Creek
Green Bay Southwest and Green Bay West High Schools
Duck Creek Team
Teachers and students from Green Bay Southwest High School have been monitoring Duck Creek since the start of the program in 2003. Green Bay West High School joined the monitoring efforts in 2019.
Location
Duck Creek runs parallel to the Fox River to the west. It's headwaters are in agricultural land, traveling through Oneida tribal lands, two county parks (Brown County, upstream and Pamperin, downstream) and 3 golf courses. Eventually it moves through major residential areas in Green Bay and Howard Suamico. Duck Creek empties to the northwest of the mouth of the Fox River.
Duck Creek is dominated by agricultural land use, with urbanized areas near the outlet. The total watershed area is approximately 393 square km, with 276 square km of primarily agriculture use upstream of the USGS monitoring station located at CTH FF. The boundary for the area draining to the USGS site is shown by the upstream solid black line on the land use map at the right. The second black line downstream of the CTH FF site is a potential future monitoring site that would capture 355 square km of the watershed.
Green Bay Southwest High School monitors at both the USGS site and 1 mile upstream at the Overland Road bridge.
Challenges
Duck Creek has a very unique bottom. It is nearly solid bedrock at our upstream site (Overland Rd) and becomes more cobbled as it moves downstream to our FF site. A solid stream bed bottom makes it difficult for macroinvertebrates to find a place to live whereas the cobbled stream bottom makes for an excellent home for them.
Duck Creek also has consistently high phosphorous readings. There are many possible sources for these high readings including agricultural input, residential input, or golf course input. Seasonal rains and runoff also make Duck Creek very flashy. In late summer there can be a rocky bottom exposed and just pools of water rather than a constant flow of water. In the spring the snow melt and runoff can make the stream flow treacherous and cause us to do our sampling by lowering a bucket from the bridge.