By Michael Dietz

Many of us have heard about watershed protection efforts. Perhaps you live in a drinking water supply watershed. Poor Willy Wonka was wrongly accused of poisoning the watershed of his brown river (it turned out to be chocolate). But what is a watershed, really? In physical terms, a watershed is an area of land that drains to a specified point. The size of the watershed depends upon where you put the point. For example, a tiny stream that runs near your home might have a relatively small area of land that drains to it, but the point on the Connecticut River where it meets the Long Island Sound has a very large watershed (11,300 square miles!) that extends all the way up to Canada. So we all live in a watershed, it just depends on where you put the point! Read more…