What is a Watershed? In case you didn’t know, or didn’t remember, a watershed is all the land that “sheds” water from rain and snowmelt into a specific stream, river, or lake. The goal of this experiment is for you to learn more about what a watershed is and how you impact your watershed or larger watersheds that are connected to yours. 

     All the different colors running down the hills represent all the “stuff” or added nutrients that run into the streams and contaminate our water. If this was a real water shed, the brown would represent all the soil that flows into our streams after a it rains. The green would be grass clippings or leaves, red could be oil from leaky cars or fertilizer on lawns. The things that are picked up off the ground by stormwater runoff, eventually end up in our streams and rivers and then onto the next watershed.  

    So, you might be wondering, what can I do to help protect my watershed? One way is to conserve water every day. You can also build a rain garden or build a rain barrel to reduce the amount of runoff going to your watershed and later to streams and rivers and larger watersheds. Many places are also using porous pavement so that more water infiltrates into the ground versus running off the road and into our streams causing problems down the road. It is important to protect your backyard watershed because you could be greatly impacting the health of another larger watershed.