About the Watershed Locator
Watersheds
"We all live in a watershed — the area that drains to a common waterway, such as a stream, lake, estuary, wetland, aquifer, or even the ocean — and our individual actions can directly affect it. Working together using a watershed approach will help protect our nation's water resources." U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Pacific salmon territory of North America
Watershed boundaries are especially significant in Pacific salmon territory. We define Pacific salmon territory as the historic extent of anadromous (ocean-going) Pacific salmon and steelhead. The region covered by this watershed locator (v. 1) excludes portions of Pacific salmon territory in the Canadian Yukon and in Baja California, for which we do not have data at this time. It also excludes the Western Pacific range of the species, which extends to Russia, Japan and Korea. For more information on Pacific salmon, see State of the Salmon, a joint program of Ecotrust and the Wild Salmon Center.
How the Watershed Locator works
When a user submits an address search, the Watershed Locator sends a request to the Yahoo! Geocoder service. If the geocoder is able to identify the address, it returns its location in the form of a latitude/longitude coordinate pair. We then use this coordinate pair to perform a watershed search on our server, using PostGIS to identify the Pacific salmon-territory watershed within which the given coordinate falls. This watershed information is then returned to the web browser.
This application utilizes a variety of open source software on the client and server. Within the browser interface, we feature an Open Layers mapping client. This client manages a variety of image layers including a Google terrain base layer and our own watershed and stream layers served via Mapserver. We also utilize TileCache to cache images and reduce the load on our servers.
The code for this tool is open source and freely available for use in other open source projects. For more information visit the development site
Find restoration groups in your watershed
After identifying your watershed, more information about groups working to protect and restore watershed health is available at these sites:
California Watershed Network
Network of Oregon Watershed Councils
Washington State Watershed Planning Act
EPA’s Surf Your Watershed
