How to describe a watershed?
Watersheds are discrete units of land area defined by ridges and divides that shed water into a common drainage or outlet to a lake or sea. They are denudation systems defined by patterns of regional geology and climate that sculpt and define landscapes. Watersheds are predominately unidirectional collection, storage, processing and transport systems for water, energy, sediment, nutrients and life connecting the land and the sea. Watersheds are transitional, multi-layered complexes of ecosystems and ecotones that transect many different environments from headwaters to river mouths, uplands to mid channels and surface waters to aquifers. Watersheds are the natural habitat of most people of the world and therefore the ecosystem complex most impacted by human exploitation, ignorance and carelessness. At any one point in time, the streams and rivers of the world contain only about 0.0001% of the ecosphere’s water. However, all of the active waters of the Earth have cycled though these glob
