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What
is a watershed?
A
watershed is any land that drains into a river, lake, stream, or other
body of water. A watershed includes the body of water and its
surrounding land.
What does this mean to me?
It means
that YOU live in a watershed. Watersheds are all around you.
Everything including houses, farms, ranches, forests, towns and even
cities are all part of a watershed. That’s because all of these things
help to transport water, whether through ground water or surface water
that flows directly to rivers and lakes. This includes runoff
water that forms a tiny river in the gutters along roads. It is
traveling to another body of water or sinking into the ground. When
it sinks into the ground, it becomes groundwater that is also traveling
downhill to a body of water--like a lake or stream.
There is no watershed in the world that does not have
some sort of contamination. Fertilizers and pesticides used in farming
travel to a watershed and contaminate it. This impacts the aquatic
wildlife that lives there. Decades of food chains have been
ruined this way. Water contamination on the surface can spread
quickly throughout the entire watershed. Water that sinks into the
ground and becomes groundwater can spread this contamination even
more. Since our drinking water comes from watersheds, we need to be
very careful about what goes into it.
Humans can change a watershed with the littlest
action. When we change natural bodies of water for our own use, we
change the watershed. People build dams for hydroelectric power. A
dam may change the habitats of the river or stream that they are on.
Small things like clearing land, building a house or mall, farming, using
chemicals on yards, and building a factory can make large changes to a
watershed and the water in it. There are pros and cons to think
about before changing a watershed.
Watersheds have to be protected and kept
healthy. Since a watershed is the system that moves water to
rivers, lakes, streams, or oceans, it means that a contaminated watershed
will spread that contamination to clean bodies of water which then become
contaminated. Keeping watersheds protected and clean is a benefit to
you and me.
Watersheds are very important. The New York City
watershed system has eighteen upstate reservoirs and three controlled
lakes that cover some one thousand-nine-hundred square miles in the
Catskill Mountains and east of the Hudson River. Taking care of your
watershed is protecting your supply of drinking water.
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