By Michael Dietz (updated 9/2025)

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!

The NEMO Program

CLEAR’s NEMO (Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials) program has been working with communities to protect water quality through better land use since 1991. At present, our main focus in on helping Connecticut communities respond to the “MS4” stormwater general permit, which was expanded in 2017. And we have developed various tools to help protect our waterways, like the NEMO Rain Garden smartphone app, and the N-Sink tool to determine areas in a watershed that are important for reducing nitrogen pollution, and the Watershed Assessment tool to estimate the health of your local watersheds. We developed the Stormwater Corps, deploying trained undergraduates to perform stormwater retrofit analyses for towns. for more information visit the UConn CLEAR Water resources website, or the CLEAR NEMO program website.