Common Ground - Western Reserve Land Conservancy

© DAVID LIAM KYLE
Dike 14, about a dozen organizations formed an educational
collaborative that uses the property as a teaching tool.
In addition, some local and regional park districts also
maintain preserve areas that are primarily for the protection
of their natural features.
Water resource protection: a success story
From the notorious burning of the Cuyahoga River in 1969
– an event that led to the passage of the federal Clean
Water Act – through today, northern Ohio has done a lot to
preserve and restore water quality. Those actions not only
impact our drinking water but also the water quality as far
away as the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.
Northern Ohio’s rich fresh water resources are split evenly
between the Ohio/Mississippi River Watershed and the Lake
Erie/Great Lakes Watershed. The Great Lakes are the world’s
28 CHAPTER 3 HOW AND WHY LAND IS PRESERVED
largest supply of surface fresh water, and the Ohio River
is part of the largest river system in North America, the
Mississippi River Watershed.
So how does land protection figure into this?
It is one of the tools used to keep our water resources
healthy. Many of our regional watersheds have Watershed
Action Plans, Remedial Action Plans and/or Balanced
Growth Initiatives that, among other things, call for the
preservation of stream corridors. Many of these planning
efforts have been largely funded through federal and state
money from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the
Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and ODNR.
Watershed coordinators, through the Watershed Action Plan,
work to develop and implement watershed action plans
with input from stakeholders. The goal of each plan is to
restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological
integrity of water resources within the watershed. One of
the implementation methods may include the protection of
high quality resources through easement purchase and other
voluntary set-aside programs.
Remedial Action Plans are an effort by the U.S. and Ohio
EPAs to address the most polluted and environmentally
impacted rivers in Ohio’s Lake Erie watershed. There are four
RAPs in Ohio: Ashtabula River, Black River, Cuyahoga River
and Maumee River. All but the Maumee River watershed are
located in this report’s study area.
The Balanced Growth Initiative in the Lake Erie Watershed
focuses on land use and development planning and its
relationship to the health of watershed and the Lake. The
process helps to locally determine Priority Conservation
Areas and Priority Development Areas in each watershed.
Another watershed model used in the region is the model of
a watershed conservancy district. This is a much older model