Terminology
A region of land that drains to a particular body of water such as a river or a lake.
What is a Watershed?
How water constantly moves between the Earth and the atmosphere.
What is the Water Cycle?
This large mammal is an "ecosystem engineer" famous for building dams that flood areas, creating vital wetland habitats for other species.
What is Beaver?
This flexible, hydrophilic woody plants is highly adapted to saturated soils and serves as primary browse for riparian wildlife.
What is Willow?
The point at which two rivers/streams/etc. flow together.
What is a Confluence?
Non-living components of a watershed, such as soil, rocks, water, and air.
What are Abiotic Factors?
Flat areas adjacent to rivers that periodically flood during high water events. They are essential for storing excess water, reducing flood impacts, recharging groundwater, and filtering pollutants.
What is a Floodplain?
All living components within a watershed, such as plants, animals, and microorganisms.
What are Biotic Factors?
This tree produces fluffy, cotton-like seeds and depends on seasonal floods to clear out fresh mud for its seeds to grow.
What is a Cottonwood?
The management of physical, chemical, or biological characteristics of a site with the goal of returning natural/historic functions to sites that formerly supported wetlands.
What is Restoration?
Areas adjacent to rivers and streams that provide critical habitat, with a large percentage of wildlife relying on them for some portion of their life cycle.
What is a Riparian Area?
Describes the amount of curvature in a stream channel.
What is Sinuosity?
Living Organisms without backbones or internal skeletons that live on or near the bottom of a water body.
What are Benthic Macroinvertabrates?
This cold-water riparian tree forms a symbiotic relationship with bacteria in its roots to fix nitrogen, single-handedly fertilizing poor streamside soils while providing thick canopy shade.
What is an alder tree?
The amount of oxygen present in the water column.
What is dissolved oxygen?
This type of pollution enters a watershed from a single, distinct, and traceable location, like a factory drainage pipe.
What is point-source pollution?
This is an underground layer of rock, sand, or gravel that holds and filters massive amounts of groundwater.
This is the term for any species whose health or presence directly signals the overall environmental condition of an ecosystem.
What are Indicator Species?
Unlike true grasses, these triangular-stemmed, water-loving plants have dense, mat-like root systems that act like structural "rebar", capable of handling extreme water velocities along riverbanks.
What are Sedges?
Rain-dependent streams that flow only after precipitation.
What are ephemeral streams?
An in-stream erosion process where a river or stream rapidly erodes downward into its bed, deepening its channel into a trench-like shape that disconnects the water from its natural floodplain.
What is Incision?
Hydrologic modifications and straightening of stream shape that may cause dramatic changes in the stream ecosystem.
What is Channelization?
Through intense grazing and wallowing, this North American megafauna functions as a keystone species that alters watershed hydrology by creating micro-depressions that retain seasonal rainwater.
What is Bison?
While invasive varieties of this prickly weed ruin watershed soils via erosion, its native North American counterparts (recognizable by silvery, white leaf-undersides) are benign, non-aggressive protectors that provide vital nectar for pollinator species.
What is Thistle?
Describes environmental changes, pollution, or phenomena that originate from human activity, rather than natural processes.
What is Anthropogenic?