A watershed is an area of land that drains to a particular point; for example, everything in the Huron River Watershed eventually slopes downhill to the mouth of the Huron River on Lake Erie. A “creekshed” is simply a small version of a watershed that is defined by the land draining a particular creek. The Huron River Watershed is full of creeksheds: Arms, Honey, Davis, Mill, Fleming, Horseshoe, Norton, Chilson, Portage, and Hay are all examples.
Over the last year, HRWC has been thinking on the creekshed scale by looking specifically at our creeks and the land that affects them. We have been synthesizing all of our knowledge on these creeksheds and putting them into easily digestible and colorful 4 page reports. The front page of the reports contains basic information such as the size of creekshed and creek, a map of the creekshed, and either history or a point of interest about the creekshed. The middle two pages summarize all of our monitoring data for the creekshed and give a simple three level rating (poor, fair, or excellent). The final page highlights some of the environmental successes in the creekshed and discusses some of the major environmental challenges still facing the creekshed and its residents.
This is a great process not only for the residents of the Huron River Watershed, who get to see the results, but it is a great exercise for the HRWC staff. It provides us with the opportunity to think wholistically about a creekshed and come to a better understanding of it by sharing what we know with each other, and along the way discovering new things that none of us knew before.
Four creeksheds have reports currently available:
Honey (Washtenaw) Creekshed Report
More will be available in the future at http://www.hrwc.org/the-watershed/features/huron-river-creeks/
Lend us a hand!
We couldn’t have written these reports without our volunteers. Volunteers contribute a lot of time and effort to help HRWC collect monitoring data. This data is used to help us understand the quality of the Huron River Watershed and indicate where extra planning, education, or restoration work is needed.
Our next event is the River Roundup on October 6. Register here by October 3. See you there!