About Our Watersheds

What is a watershed?

A watershed is an area of land where all the water, streams, and rainfall flow to a common outlet such as a lake. Everything within a watershed is connected, and all actions that affect the water upstream affect the water downstream.

A watershed can be very big or very small. For example, all the rainfall going into Bay City Creek is part of the Bay City Creek Watershed. However, the Bay City Creek Watershed is also part of greater watersheds such as the Lake Superior Watershed — where all water flows into Lake Superior.

Our Service Area: Wisconsin’s Lake Superior Basin

Our coverage area includes 2,700 miles of streams draining into Lake Superior. These rivers and streams stretch from Herbster on the Bayfield Peninsula to Hurley area near the Michigan border.

This service area includes many sub-watersheds, including:

Wisconsin’s Lake Superior Basin also contains one of the most diverse assemblages of fish in the Lake Superior Basin, many of which are listed as species of management concern by the Bad River Chippewa Tribe, US Fish and Wildlife Service and/or Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Issues Affecting Our Watersheds

A watershed is a complex system of organisms, geology, water, weather, and a myriad of other pieces impacting one another. As such, there are many complex issues in the watershed, both man-made and not, which impact all the other pieces in many ways.

Our watersheds face a number of natural challenges such as climate change, sedimentation, flooding, e-coli, invasive species, deforestation, and more. They also face a number of man-made challenges such as bids for open-pit mining, large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations, commercial-scale artesian water withdrawal, and oil pipelines and reroutes.