Your Watersheds - Our Great Lakes

Watersheds are places we call home. A watershed is an area of land that is drained by a river and its tributaries into a body of water such as a pond, lake, or river. Cities and towns are located in watersheds along with a wide variety of natural features such as wetlands, forests, streams, rivers, lakes, fish, birds, plants and wildlife. To understand how a watershed works, it helps to think about your local creek - where does it start? What types of landscapes does it pass through and were does it end up? Along the way, what is influencing the creek water quality and flow? All of the area covered is a watershed.

Almost all of us in Southern Ontario and many of us in Northern Ontario live a Conservation Authority watershed which is connected to larger, separate watersheds belonging to each Great Lake and the St. Lawrence River. All of these watersheds are nestled together into one big Great Lakes basin - or watershed - which is actually part of an even larger watershed - the Atlantic Ocean watershed.

Click on a coloured section to find Ontario's Conservation Authority watersheds