Rebecca Clarren

The folks at Ecotrust, an environmental group based in Portland, Ore. just released a nifty new tool. Find Your Watershed allows people who live in Idaho, Oregon, Washington and California to enter an address and learn about the watershed where they live: how many miles of streams host migrating salmon, the number of dams, its minimum and maximum elevation and how it connects to other watersheds. In the near future, Ecotrust plans to link users to information about what citizen groups work in each watershed.

If you live beyond the Pacific Northwest, check out the Environmental Protection Agency’s Surf Your Watershed site. Though far less aesthetically appealing than the Ecotrust site (and a bit drenched in the thick language of bureaucracy), it has links to all sorts of nerdy information, such as types of pollutants in certain rivers within the watershed, stream flow rates, and contact information for local environmental groups.

A tool for environmental educators, activists, politicians and journalists, these sorts of maps and data are usually developed with the hope that such information gives people a connection to their environment, engendering in them a certain consciousness about the things they do that affect water quality, like driving or dumping toxic stuff down the drain.