In the early days of the NC Science Trail, even before the official 2023 launch, we said there needed to be a Citizen Science component to our work. Citizen Science is, in my opinion, a true spark of genius because it gets the public involved in scientific research. And when this was a completely new concept altogether, you can probably imagine the pushback that scientists gave: because experiments should be controlled, because there should not be so many variables, because sample collection is sacred in the world of science.
What the nay-sayers were missing is that Citizen Science gets the public involved in real world concerns. It asks them to care about the world around them, and that is a beautiful thing. When a group of students, or families, or in the case of this guest-written post, local community, are given an opportunity to make a difference in the world, not only do they show up, they get wet and muddy for the sake of science; i.e., for the sake of protecting one special creek that has brought them joy, pride, curiosity, and friendship.
There is real concern here for the future of Little Alamance Creek and there is frustration over the carelessness with which it has been treated. Many would not consider it the gem that it is – not just for recreation, but a haven for important species, a wildlife conduit for allowing safe passage and food, an educational opportunity for this community to share the importance of standing up for what you believe in.
Read below to learn all about the Little Alamance Creek and the community efforts that have come together to protect this very special bit of nature.
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Written By Matt Stansbury, Land Owner, Conservationist, Creek Lover:
The kids in Burlington, NC spend a lot of time playing in Little Alamance Creek.
The headwaters flow through Burlington’s City Park, the city of 60,000 people’s primary recreation venue. Then the creek weaves through an urban landscape before ducking into my back woods.
That forest is made up of mature beech, tulip tree, white oak, red oak, paw paw, river birch, sycamore, shagbark hickory, pignut hickory, redbud, sugar maple, and sweetgum.
You can hear I-40 over the stream. Recently constructed homes peak through the trees. But the floodplain is crowded with otters, beavers, gray foxes, and turkeys.
We host kids and adults in an informal group we call the Little Alamance Family Nature Club, part of a loose affiliation of family nature clubs following the tenets of author Richard Louv’s Children & Nature Network, which you can read about here.
Our club focuses on biodiversity: identifying species using iNaturalist and creating art about our encounters. We’ve found eight species of frogs, twenty-four kinds of moths, thirty-four species of native wildflowers, and thirty species of birds.
This tiny, relatively intact ecosystem serves as a bridge between larger parcels of wild forest, just as Little Alamance Creek is a small piece of the larger Haw River watershed.
Flowing 110 miles from the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains southeast through Greensboro and Burlington, then converging with the Deep River to form the Cape Fear, the Haw’s waters eventually reach the Atlantic Ocean at Wilmington.
The Haw Watershed is home to over 900,000 people, and its waters are the region’s recreation locations and drinking water. Care for and access to those waters directly affects 900,000 residents’ health outcomes and quality of life.
With that value to the community in mind, you may think the Haw River would be highly protected. But that’s not the case.
Rapid development in Alamance County should bring in big dollars, and you’d think that the county should have a Soil and Water District Coordinator protecting its citizen’s interests. But as of May 1, 2025 the Commissioners haven’t funded the position.
In Alamance County, the lack of enforcement has led to numerous construction sites operating without proper permits, stormwater plans, or basic sediment control measures, resulting in widespread contamination of local streams.
In March of 2024, I noticed a muddy orange discharge flowing off a D.R. Horton construction site pouring into the stream. The sediment smothers aquatic life and binds to heavy metals and pesticides (which are toxic to wildlife and humans).
Haw River Assembly’s Water Quality Manager, Kaitlyn Elliot came out with a turbidity meter which measures how much light is scattered by the suspended particles. Kaitlyn found the plume pouring into Little Alamance Creek was reading 499 NTUs (Nephelometric Turbidity Units), nearly ten times the pollution level allowable by the state. By comparison, turbidity in Little Alamance Creek read only 26.7 NTU upstream.
These outcomes can be avoided with mitigation measures. But there isn’t enough enforcement.
In 2024, that same developer, D.R. Horton, made $37 billion and the silt fence still leaks.
On November 11, 2024 my partner was in our forest when she smelled 600 gallons of sewage spilling into our woods from the City of Burlington Collection System on Anthony Road upstream.
Kaitlyn investigated, but the spillage had moved downstream and dispersed. However, she took samples for pH, conductivity, and dissolved oxygen. Although the spillage had moved, there was a lasting impact. While pH and conductivity were normal, dissolved oxygen was low, around 55%. Dissolved oxygen can be low after a spillage like this because the bacteria in the sewage will rapidly use up the oxygen available in the creek. The impacts of low oxygen can include decreased reproduction rates for aquatic life or even mass fish and invertebrate die-offs.
City of Burlington’s sewage spills are chronic. One of their facilities spilled 25,000 gallons during the week of April 25, 2025. How many kids do you think were wading in the river at Alamance County’s Red Slide park that next day? You can follow reports from all of the state’s sanitary sewer overflow events here.
Kaitlyn is part of a very small team at Haw River Assembly, who use data and volunteers to help protect the people living in our watershed.
To support that effort, our group also participates in two citizen science programs for the Haw River Assembly to protect our wildlife and neighbors.
Little Alamance Creek Family Nature Club participates in both the River Watch Program (a stream monitoring and water quality protection programs and the Trash Trap Program. This allows kids and parents to have hands-on experience with science, wild creatures, and advocating for accountability.
River Watch involves tracking our stream’s health by measuring turbidity, PH, toxins and excessive nutrients. But the most exciting part is the macroinvertebrate sampling. Kids grab nets and collecting tanks to identify and document as many insects and other invertebrates as they can. This information is calculated in a formula to create a proxy score for watershed health
based on the amount of creatures found, and their pollution sensitivity.
When we took the stream sampling in December 2024, a month after the sewage spill, the stream only scored a 13 (Fair on the stream health index), finding only a worm, a few non-native clams and a damselfly nymph.
Three months later in March, 2025 when we held the first river watch activities of 2025, we found craneflies, scuds, dragonfly nymphs and a host of other creatures adding up to a score of 23 which is an “Excellent” rating.
The Trash Trap also protects the watershed and adds valuable data for the scientific community.
Trash Traps are purpose-built stormwater litter traps. These traps sit in urban creeks and streams keeping trash from entering main waterways. These devices are built to withstand the rigors of flashy rain events, yet passive enough not to harm the local fauna. Roadside littering accounts for approximately 75% of the trash in our nation’s waterways. Each time it rains, trash
is funneled through our storm drain systems directly into our creeks. No filters or other mechanisms are in place to keep the trash from entering our waterways.
Each month a volunteer team comes out to Little Alamance Creek to remove the plastic and styrofoam from the trap, and to collect data about every piece of litter using the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic Protocol. This work is done in collaboration with Waterkeepers Carolina, a statewide organization that represents 15 different waterkeeping organizations.
For a sense of scale, on April 26, 2025 we removed over 740 pieces of styrofoam alone from Little Alamance Creek.
Our hyper-local focus gives parents and kids a way to directly support their community and wildlife while building skills in biology, public policy and data analysis. We are happy to welcome folks to join us any time by joining the Haw River Assembly’s Trash Trap clean-out volunteer program.
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A final note from April:
We at the NC Science Trail would like to thank Matt, his partner, the Haw River Assembly, and the Little Alamance Creek Family Nature Club for sharing their experiences with their Citizen Science efforts and for caring for Little Alamance Creek. We love the passion that goes into this project, and we love the science that goes into this project. And just those two things will help make their work a success.