In Our Backyard
As winter snow melts, the ground becomes saturated and streams and rivers fill to capacity. Every snowflake that falls or raindrop that lands on the ground becomes part of a river watershed. So as the last days of winter weather lose their grip on Maine, consider spending a few minutes exploring your local watershed by surfing the Internet.
In Maine, hundreds of thousands of small sub-watersheds combine to form larger watersheds. Picture these watersheds fitting together like pieces of a puzzle. Watersheds come in all shapes and sizes and flow to merge and eventually become one of our nine major river watersheds. These include the Saint Croix, Saint John, Penobscot, Kennebec, Androscoggin, Piscataquis and Presumpscot, along with the smaller rivers that drain directly to the Atlantic collectively forming the South Coastal and North Coastal river watersheds.
Surfing the watershed in your backyard is easy. Just hop onto a computer, go to www.epa.gov/surf and type your zip code into the box provided. You can also use state, county, or city names to navigate the watersheds. If you have a stream by your house, or a specific river area you’d like to see, just type in its name and surf right to it.
One characteristic you’ll notice with most watersheds is that they flow across state, county, and town boundaries. In fact, few of Maine’s major watersheds are completely within the State, and all share a boundary with Canada or New Hampshire. It’s especially fun to surf the Androscoggin River, which begins in Maine, crosses through New Hampshire, and then back into Maine. The Kennebec and Androscoggin Rivers meet hundreds of miles from where they began, forming Merrymeeting Bay, rightly named for the meeting of these two majestic rivers. From this beautiful bay, the combined waters flow to the Atlantic Ocean.
If surfing your watershed has gotten you interested in protecting its water quality, you can “adopt” the watershed and work with other volunteers to help monitor and manage it. You can learn about restoration projects in and around your watershed, and if you’re really adventurous, join the Watershed Academy and participate in self-paced learning modules and web-based seminars. There are even educational opportunities for local schools in the Watershed Patch section of the Web site.
If you want to discover more about what goes on in and around Maine’s waters, then the Surf Your Watershed site is only the beginning. Click around and you’ll learn about Maine’s Water Quality program and the thousands of sampling results taken over decades of monitoring Maine waters. There is information on drinking water, wetlands, and beaches.
The winter is waning and the first days of spring bring budding anticipation of boating, swimming, and other summer water activities. So surf online while waiting for those warmer days. Then go swim in the waves, raft down the rivers, or drift with the current. With more awareness of the watersheds in your backyard you’ll enjoy your experiences even more.
This column was submitted by Vicki Schmidt, a GIS environmental specialist for the Bureau of Land & Water Quality within the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. In Our Back Yard is a weekly column of the DEP. E-mail your environmental questions to infoDEP@maine.gov or send them to In Our Back Yard, Maine DEP, 17 State House Station, Augusta, ME 04333.
