Tuscarawas River Watershed

This week we're taking a look at tools useful for watershed exploration. One that may not immediately leap to mind is your phone - more specifically, an app on your phone that allows you to research flora and fauna within the watershed before even stepping foot or muck boot outdoors. A quick Google search might list several such apps, but searching on my iPhone revealed only one still active: iNaturalist. It might have been survival of the fittest (we can hope) or it might have been "too many cooks in the kitchen" - if someone who wants the data has to check too many places to get a comprehensive overview, it could become just as tedious as searching for the data raw. What iNaturalist does, though, is takes the idea of "citizen scientists" and puts it on your phone or tablet. Now anyone and everyone who is signed up can photograph, GPS locate, and identify species in their backyard or on their vacation and upload it to one server - and all the data is availa...

This week we're diving a little deeper - this time focusing on the threats to the Tuscarawas River Watershed through the lens of projects funded and conducted by the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District that we looked at a few weeks ago. The slideshow below is the barest fragment of what the MWCD is involved in - from huge dam restoration projects to stream channel repair to education funding. Follow the links at the end of the presentation to see a more complete list of projects in the Tusc and Muskingum watersheds.

Today we're trying to see the trees of the forests; while there are many more than these, you are likely to find them if you visit the watershed. Along the Ohio and Erie Canal you will even find the more wild, thorned versions of the Honeylocust listed below - a strange, and, this close to Halloween, somewhat scary sight. The American Sycamore, too, is abundant throughout the watershed, lending its ghostly upper reaches to many a morning fog, standing in stark contrast to the dark, wet woods around it - sometimes a lonely sentinel over-watching a glass-like pond in morning stillness.

The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District oversees and manages many programs - including the dams and reservoirs - within the Tuscarawas River Watershed. Here is a brief overview of the organization.