This map shows the 8-digit watersheds that intersect New York State. These hydrologic unit boundaries provide a uniquely identified and uniform method of subdividing the state into large drainage areas at 1:250,000 scale.
Data Source: 8-Digit Watersheds, New York State, 1994. U. S. Geological Survey (USGS). CUGIR. https://cugir.library.cornell.edu/catalog/cugir-007314
Beaver dams create fascinating conditions on the landscape. In general, beaver dams are relatively small and ephemeral since the beavers leave after they exhaust accessible food in an area.
These dams often provide many unique benefits to the ecosystem. Beaver dams provide excellent and under-represented wetland habitat that benefits wetland plants, reptiles, wetland birds, amphibians, waterfowl, muskrat, mink, and the beaver themselves.
Much like the sky, rivers are rarely painted one color. Across the world, they appear in shades of yellow, green, blue, and brown. Subtle changes in the environment can alter the color of rivers, though, shifting them away from their typical hues. New research shows the dominant color has changed in about one-third of large rivers in the continental United States over the past 35 years.
“Changes in river color serve as a first pass that tell us something is going on nearby,” said John Gardner, the study’s lead author and a hydrologist at the University of Pittsburgh. “There are a lot of details to parse out on what is causing those changes, though.”
The figure above shows data from the first map of river color for the contiguous United States. The rivers are colored as they would approximately appear to our eye. Gardner and colleagues built the map from 234,727 images collected by Landsat satellites between 1984 and 2018. The dataset includes 67,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) of waterways of at least 200 feet (60 meters) wide. Around 56 percent of rivers were dominantly yellow over the course of the study and 38 percent were dominantly green. The team has released an interactive map where the public can further investigate color trends in individual rivers.
As the city grew in size, efforts to clean the river increased, including the construction of waste treatment plants and even a canal that permanently reversed the flow of the river, bringing clean water from Lake Michigan into the mouth of the river.
When Richard J. Daley took office as the mayor of Chicago in 1955 he was determined to develop the riverfront and tasked city workers with finding where the sewage was coming from. They used the green dye to help identify the source of the waste.