About this Project:
Many groups throughout the Lake Superior basin are taking a keen interest in their watershed. A group of natural resource professionals and citizens, called the “Wisconsin Lake Superior Basin Partner Team” produced a guide to help groups in the basin assess hydrology as an important step in their watershed plan. The Team used the Marengo River watershed as a test case.

Caption: natural resource professionals reviewed preliminary findings

An understanding of a watershed’s hydrology tells us how land management practices affect the quantity, quality, timing, and velocity of water runoff and flow throughout a watershed. In the Lake Superior basin, water runs off the clay soils very quickly. The rapid runoff changes the shape and character of streams and leads to heavy sedimentation- a leading cause of water quality and habitat impairment in Wisconsin’s Lake Superior basin streams.
About this guide:
The Partner Team selected the Marengo River watershed to demonstrate a process to assess hydrologic condition. The six step process is based on a framework developed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. The Marengo River Watershed Test Case shows that analysis. By doing the test case, the Team developed A Guide to Understanding the Hydrologic Condition of Wisconsin’s Lake Superior Watersheds. It takes a watershed or land use planning group through the steps of finding resource information, figuring out who can help interpret information, creating maps, rating important features, and developing recommendations for a watershed plan based on hydrologic conditions.

This project is funded through a grant through the Great Lakes Commission and supported by the U.S. Forest Service, UW Extension, Wisconsin Sea Grant, Ashland Bayfield Douglas Iron County Land and Water Conservation Dept. Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians Natural Resources Department.