Home > Managing A Watershed > Assessing Water Quality > Watershed Reconnaissance

The Watershed Reconnaissance provides an overview of the current state of water quality and water quantity in the Millstone Watershed’s 265-square mile drainage area.  In the Watershed Reconnaissance, the Watershed Association collected base-line information from readily available sources over a short period of time to complete a ‘snapshot’ of the Watershed’s environmental health.  From this information, we gained a general perspective on the conditions, issues and trends at work across the entire Millstone River Watershed.  This was then used to target and focus the more detailed subwatershed Characterization and Assessment projects.  The Watershed Reconnaissance is a summary of the individual data sets gathered, and scored each indicator to develop a final rank for each subwatershed in the Millstone River Watershed.

The key piece of information for the Watershed Reconnaissance is the health of our waters.  Data from the StreamWatch Program is being used to see what the state of our water quality is, and this will be combined with other data to determine which subwatersheds are currently the most in need of restoration and protection.