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Brush Creek, Sonoma County
Brush Creek or Rincon Creek is a tributary of Santa Rosa Creek in Sonoma County, California. Brush Creek rises in the southern slopes of the Mayacamas Mountains within Sonoma County. The lower reach of the creek is a suburban medium density residential area in the city of Santa Rosa, and that reach of Brush Creek has been restored during the 1990s under a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant to promote steelhead migration and spawning. Further restoration and incorporation into citywide park planning is currently underway as of 2006. The location of the confluence with Santa Rosa Creek is particularly noteworthy, since it was a locus of prehistoric life as a village of the Pomo people and a scenic geologic feature of massive flat boulder outcrops within the stream channel. Brush Creek is a watercourse of approximately three miles in length that drains the area known as Rincon Valley in north Santa Rosa and the outlying unincorporated areas. The stream is shown on U.S. Ge ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
California State Route 12
State Route 12 (SR 12) is a state highway in the U.S. state of California that travels in an east–west direction from State Route 116 in Sebastopol in Sonoma County to State Route 49 just north of San Andreas in Calaveras County. The route connects the Sonoma and Napa valleys with the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta and the Sierra Foothills. It is constructed to freeway standards from the Fulton Road/South Wright Road stoplight in Santa Rosa, to its partial interchange with Farmers Lane (also in Santa Rosa). Route description There are six segments that are overlaps with other highways: in the Napa and Sonoma valleys with SR 121, in the southern Napa Valley with SR 29, a short overlap with I-80 at Cordelia Junction in Fairfield, another short overlap with SR 99 in Lodi, and overlaps with SR 88 and SR 26 in the Sierra foothills. The highway is mainly two lane rural highway, with the exception of short segments in Santa Rosa and Fairfield/Suisun City, the ov ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vegetation
Vegetation is an assemblage of plant species and the ground cover they provide. It is a general term, without specific reference to particular taxa, life forms, structure, spatial extent, or any other specific botanical or geographic characteristics. It is broader than the term ''flora'' which refers to species composition. Perhaps the closest synonym is plant community, but ''vegetation'' can, and often does, refer to a wider range of spatial scales than that term does, including scales as large as the global. Primeval redwood forests, coastal mangrove stands, sphagnum bogs, desert soil crusts, roadside weed patches, wheat fields, cultivated gardens and lawns; all are encompassed by the term ''vegetation''. The vegetation type is defined by characteristic dominant species, or a common aspect of the assemblage, such as an elevation range or environmental commonality. The contemporary use of ''vegetation'' approximates that of ecologist Frederic Clements' term earth cover, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Silt
Silt is granular material of a size between sand and clay and composed mostly of broken grains of quartz. Silt may occur as a soil (often mixed with sand or clay) or as sediment mixed in suspension with water. Silt usually has a floury feel when dry, and lacks plasticity when wet. Silt also can be felt by the tongue as granular when placed on the front teeth (even when mixed with clay particles). Silt is a common material, making up 45% of average modern mud. It is found in many river deltas and as wind-deposited accumulations, particularly in central Asia, north China, and North America. It is produced in both very hot climates (through such processes as collisions of quartz grains in dust storms) and very cold climates (through such processes as glacial grinding of quartz grains.) Loess is soil rich in silt which makes up some of the most fertile agricultural land on Earth. However, silt is very vulnerable to erosion, and it has poor mechanical properties, making construction ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gravel
Gravel is a loose aggregation of rock fragments. Gravel occurs naturally throughout the world as a result of sedimentary and erosive geologic processes; it is also produced in large quantities commercially as crushed stone. Gravel is classified by particle size range and includes size classes from granule- to boulder-sized fragments. In the Udden-Wentworth scale gravel is categorized into granular gravel () and pebble gravel (). ISO 14688 grades gravels as fine, medium, and coarse, with ranges 2–6.3 mm to 20–63 mm. One cubic metre of gravel typically weighs about 1,800 kg (or a cubic yard weighs about 3,000 lb). Gravel is an important commercial product, with a number of applications. Almost half of all gravel production is used as aggregate for concrete. Much of the rest is used for road construction, either in the road base or as the road surface (with or without asphalt or other binders.) Naturally occurring porous gravel deposits have a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soil Conservation Service
Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), formerly known as the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), is an agency of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) that provides technical assistance to farmers and other private landowners and managers. Its name was changed in 1994 during the presidency of Bill Clinton to reflect its broader mission. It is a relatively small agency, currently comprising about 12,000 employees. Its mission is to improve, protect, and conserve natural resources on private lands through a cooperative partnership with state and local agencies. While its primary focus has been agricultural lands, it has made many technical contributions to soil surveying, classification, and water quality improvement. One example is the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP), set up to quantify the benefits of agricultural conservation efforts promoted and supported by programs in the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 (2002 Farm Bill). NRCS is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Streambed
A stream bed or streambed is the bottom of a stream or river (bathymetry) or the physical confine of the normal water flow (channel). The lateral confines or channel margins are known as the stream banks or river banks, during all but flood stage. Under certain conditions a river can branch from one stream bed to multiple stream beds. A flood occurs when a stream overflows its banks and flows onto its flood plain. As a general rule, the bed is the part of the channel up to the normal water line, and the banks are that part above the normal water line. However, because water flow varies, this differentiation is subject to local interpretation. Usually, the bed is kept clear of terrestrial vegetation, whereas the banks are subjected to water flow only during unusual or perhaps infrequent high water stages and therefore might support vegetation some or much of the time. The nature of any stream bed is always a function of the flow dynamics and the local geologic materials, influ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erosion
Erosion is the action of surface processes (such as water flow or wind) that removes soil, rock, or dissolved material from one location on the Earth's crust, and then transports it to another location where it is deposited. Erosion is distinct from weathering which involves no movement. Removal of rock or soil as clastic sediment is referred to as ''physical'' or ''mechanical'' erosion; this contrasts with ''chemical'' erosion, where soil or rock material is removed from an area by dissolution. Eroded sediment or solutes may be transported just a few millimetres, or for thousands of kilometres. Agents of erosion include rainfall; bedrock wear in rivers; coastal erosion by the sea and waves; glacial plucking, abrasion, and scour; areal flooding; wind abrasion; groundwater processes; and mass movement processes in steep landscapes like landslides and debris flows. The rates at which such processes act control how fast a surface is eroded. Typically, physical erosion procee ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asphalt Concrete
Asphalt concrete (commonly called asphalt, blacktop, or pavement in North America, and tarmac, bitumen macadam, or rolled asphalt in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland) is a composite material commonly used to surface roads, parking lots, airports, and the core of embankment dams. Asphalt mixtures have been used in pavement construction since the beginning of the twentieth century. It consists of mineral aggregate bound together with asphalt, laid in layers, and compacted. The process was refined and enhanced by Belgian-American inventor Edward De Smedt. The terms ''asphalt'' (or ''asphaltic'') ''concrete'', ''bituminous asphalt concrete'', and ''bituminous mixture'' are typically used only in engineering and construction documents, which define concrete as any composite material composed of mineral aggregate adhered with a binder. The abbreviation, ''AC'', is sometimes used for ''asphalt concrete'' but can also denote ''asphalt content'' or ''asphalt cement'', ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dissipation
In thermodynamics, dissipation is the result of an irreversible process that takes place in homogeneous thermodynamic systems. In a dissipative process, energy (internal, bulk flow kinetic, or system potential) transforms from an initial form to a final form, where the capacity of the final form to do thermodynamic work is less than that of the initial form. For example, heat transfer is dissipative because it is a transfer of internal energy from a hotter body to a colder one. Following the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy varies with temperature (reduces the capacity of the combination of the two bodies to do work), but never decreases in an isolated system. These processes produce entropy at a certain rate. The entropy production rate times ambient temperature gives the dissipated power. Important examples of irreversible processes are: heat flow through a thermal resistance, fluid flow through a flow resistance, diffusion (mixing), chemical reactions, and electric cu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quercus Garryana
''Quercus garryana'' is an oak tree species of the Pacific Northwest, with a range stretching from southern California to southwestern British Columbia. It is commonly known as the Oregon white oak or Oregon oak or, in Canada, the Garry oak. It grows from sea level to an altitude of in the northern part of its range, and from in the south of the range in California. The eponymous Nicholas Garry was deputy governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Description It is typically of medium height, growing slowly to around and occasionally as high as 100 ft, or in shrub form to tall. The trunks grow to thick, exceptionally . The Bark (botany), bark is gray and fissured. It has the characteristic oval profile of other oaks when solitary, but is also known to grow in groves close enough together that crowns may form a canopy. The leaves are deciduous, long and 1–3 inches broad, with 3–7 deep lobes on each side, darker green on top and finely haired below. The flowers are catk ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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