Barrie Creeks, Lovers Creek, and Hewitt's Creek Subwatershed Plan

• East of the Barrie Creeks subwatershed is the Lovers Creek subwatershed, at 59.9 km 2 in area.
Fifty eight percent of its area lies within the Town of Innisfil and the remaining area in the City of
Barrie. Thirty five percent of the land in Lovers Creek consists of natural heritage features,
including forests, wetlands, and grasslands. Agriculture accounts for 34%, and developed land
uses account for 21%.
• The Hewitt’s Creek subwatershed is the smallest subwatershed, with a surface area of only 17.5
km 2 . Sixty percent of its area lies within the Town of Innisfil, with the remaining area in the
southern portion of the City of Barrie. Over half of the Hewitt’s Creek subwatershed is occupied
by agriculture; and natural heritage features and urban land both occupy close to 20%
(respectively) of the subwatershed area.
This subwatershed plan was prepared under the direction of the Lake Simcoe Protection Plan (LSPP),
which was released by the province in 2009. The LSPP identifies the preparation of subwatershed
evaluations/plans as a crucial stage in its implementation. The LSPP states that they “will be critical for
prioritizing actions, developing focused action plans, monitoring and evaluating results…[and will]
provide more detailed guidance for area-specific hydrologic and natural heritage resource planning and
management.”
It should be noted that the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation
Authority’s (LSRCA’s) Integrated Watershed Management
Plan (IWMP) (2008) also influenced the development of this
subwatershed plan. The IWMP, released by the LSRCA in
2008, is considered to be a road map that outlines the future
direction of the protection and rehabilitation of the entire Lake
Simcoe watershed. Its broad-scale recommendations provide
the basis for a number of this plan’s recommended actions for
the smaller scale Barrie, Lovers, and Hewitt’s Creeks
subwatersheds; these two reports are meant to complement
each other.
APPROACH
The initial focus of this subwatershed planning
exercise used an ecosystem approach. This
approach takes into consideration all of the
components of the environment to assess the
overall health of the environment in the
subwatershed. This includes considerations of the
movement of water through the system, land use,
climate, geology, and local species. Everything is
intricately related, and changes in any one area
can have significant effects on others
In this subwatershed plan, we include an analysis
of water quality, water quantity, aquatic habitat, and
terrestrial habitat (e.g. wetlands, forests, and
State-pressure-response framework
grasslands) information. Each chapter follows an
identical format loosely structured around a state-pressure-response framework. Each chapter begins
with a description of the current condition (state), then describes the stressors likely leading to the
current condition (pressure), and finally provides recommendations for improvement (response).