Sturgeon City

What was once a wastewater treatment plant now offers educational opportunities to students and a home to the native sturgeon species which once spawned in the waters of Wilson Bay.

Preview your trip on the web: Sturgeon City

Learn more

• EPA High School Environmental Center A resource page that provides a great deal of useful information for high school students studying or wishing to learn more about the environment and what they can do to help protect it. Major topics include air, waste and recycling, conservation, water, ecosystems, and health and safety.
• The Office of Wetlands, Oceans, and Watersheds Students can learn about watersheds and how to protect the nation's water resources.
• EPA Student Center Uses multimedia games, sourcebooks, and many other resources to teach students and teachers about conservation, ecosystems, recycling, air pollution, water pollution, human health, plants, and animals.
• Lesson plan: Pollution plume The students will simulate a plume to illustrate point source and non-point source pollution.
• Lesson plan: A case study of "A Civil Action" This is a short, culminating activity that can be used to assess your students' understanding of the steps needed to determine if a water source is contaminated and how it got that way, and to suggest possible methods of cleanup or remediation. Students review a portion of the film "A Civil Action" and identify the problem and the people involved. Students then take the role of environmental scientist and apply their knowledge of water and hazardous waste contamination to create a plan to help lawyer, Jan Schlichtmann, try the case.
• Lesson plan: Ecosystem Services - Water Purification This lesson teaches students the importance of healthy ecosystems by investigating the example of natural water purification. Students will learn how ecosystems remove pollution from the water and how much it costs humans to do this artificially once ecosystems are no longer healthy.

Related pages

• Betsy-Jeff Penn 4-H Educational Center: This 4-H Educational Center provides year-round programming, including team-building and environmental education to students in 2nd through 6th grades.
• Roanoke/Cashie River Center: Open Tuesday-Saturday, this is a great place to take students to learn more about the wetlands and the history of the area.
• Rendezvous Mountain Educational State Forest: North Carolina's system of Educational State Forests has been developed to "teach children and adults about the complex, interdependent ecosystems which make up a forest and which can be managed for a multitude of uses."

Related topics

• Learn more about North Carolina, Onslow County, bivalves, environmental science, fish, habitats, insects, nature centers, pollution, science, shorebirds, and wildlife.

Legal

The New River and Wilson Bay used to be the dumping place for treated wastewater from the city of Jacksonville, North Carolina. This resulted in little to no life in the river and making it useless for fishermen and recreational activities. In 1998, a new wastewater treatment plant was built and it operates on a different system and no longer discharges into the New River. The Wilson Bay Initiative was created to clean up the waterway and the old plant has been overhauled to raise sturgeon, a native species of fish that used to spawn in Wilson Bay. Today, Sturgeon City is now an environmental education center which provides programs to the public.

Sturgeon City offers Onslow County and Camp Lejeune students free field trips. “Activities include: exploration of the Sturgeon City restored and natural marsh, plant and animal identification and classification with field books and lecture, examination of a freshwater lily pond habitat, and tours of the former Wilson Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant and the newer Land Application plant.”

Sturgeon City is located on Wilson Bay, just off the New River. Contact Jeanne Stanley at 938-6452 or jstanley@ci.jacksonville.nc.us to schedule a trip or to request more information.

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