What makes a good watershed

These goods and services are essential to our social, environmental and economic well-being. The wide array of critical ecosystem services provided by healthy watersheds is frequently undervalued when making land use decisions. Due to the complexity of natural systems and economic precedents, it is difficult to assign a dollar amount to a particular ecosystem service. However, there is a large body of research and evidence to support the fact that intact healthy ecosystems avoid costly restoration and ecosystem service replacement, and provide long-term economic opportunities and jobs.

Watershed protection is a means of protecting a lake, river, or stream by managing the entire watershed that drains into it. Clean, healthy watersheds depend on an informed public to make the right decisions when it comes to the environment and actions made by the community. This could mean that the water is not suitable to drink, swim in or to consume the fish that was caught there. The leading causes of pollution in our waterways are sediments, bacteria such as E.

Although nutrients sound like things that belong in a healthy environment, they can cause big problems in a poorly managed watershed. Human Health : A healthy watershed provides safe drinking water, provides food, enables us to adapt to the impacts of climate change more easily by cooling the air and absorbing greenhouse gas emissions, and provides natural areas for people to keep active and recharge our batteries.

Ecological Health : A healthy watershed conserves water, promotes streamflow, supports sustainable streams, rivers, lakes, and groundwater sources, enables healthy soil for crops and livestock, and also provides habitat for wildlife and plants.

Economic Health : A healthy watershed produces energy and supplies water for agriculture, industry and households. I want to A watershed is simply the geographic area through which water flows across the land and drains into a common body of water, whether a stream, river, lake, or ocean. The watershed boundary will more or less follow the highest ridgeline around the stream channels and meet at the bottom or lowest point of the land where water flows out of the watershed, the mouth of the waterway.

Much of the water comes from rainfall and stormwater runoff. The quality and quantity of stormwater is affected by all the alterations to the land--mining, agriculture, roadways, urban development, and the activities of people within a watershed. Watersheds are usually separated from other watersheds by naturally elevated areas.