Learn our Ottawa River Kichissippi Watershed

As an ecosystem, the watershed provides many free services to about a million people and countless wildlife - still. But this is changing, and not for the better, sadly. People are the cause. Climate warming, dams, shoreline development, sewage and sewerage are all nibbling away its health. Not good! Is this inevitable? No! If we all could but understand the small changes to our way life needed to reverse the trend, its hard to imagine that we wouldn't do it. Being part of our shoreline cleanup this year along the Torbolton Reach shows all of us the way. Be the change. Join the cleanup. Start with this True/False primer. Then register today! And tell your friends, too.

Here is the link to send everyone, that connects them to the cleanup:

http://c-bayshorelinecleanup.eventbrite.ca/

The area of the watershed is 147,000 square kilometres, which is bigger than New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island combined! * (Required, Multiple choice)

More than three hundreds species of birds use the watershed each year. * (Required, Multiple choice)

Constance Bay’s once-upon-a-time Big Sand Point (now taken for road building) was the site of part of a prehistoric village * (Required, Multiple choice)

With its 17 (and possibly 19) species of freshwater mussels, the watershed has more mussel species than all the lakes and rivers of Europe combined. * (Required, Multiple choice)

The Torbolton Reach (Constance Bay and surroundings) beaches are safe for swimming and fishing during Shoreline Cleanup, according to the Swim Guide. * (Required, Multiple choice)

The all-female American Eel (Anguilla rostrata) in the Ottawa River Watershed are a part of a single breeding population in which all individuals travel to the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean to spawn. * (Required, Multiple choice)

The plastic items that are dropped onto beaches, shorelines and the riparian zone in the watershed can find their way to the Atlantic Ocean and last for hundreds of years. * (Required, Multiple choice)

The lake sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens) is the largest and longest lived of any of Canada’s freshwater species. An adult sturgeon can reach a length of 2.5 metres, weigh more than 150 kilograms and live more than 100 years. * (Required, Multiple choice)

The Harbour Seal (Phoca vitulina) was last seen in the river visiting the Ottawa area in 1884 when dam building first began. * (Required, Multiple choice)

Ice age glaciers were sufficiently weighty (3 km thick) to isotatically depress the land, resulting in marine flooding of today’s Ottawa River watershed, creating the Champlain Sea, a hundred meters deep over Parliament Hill. * (Required, Multiple choice)

As more and more people’s developments encroach on the riparian zone, the quality of the river’s waters and the biodiversity of the watershed generally decline. * (Required, Multiple choice)

The Ottawa River is the biggest tributary of the St. Lawrence River, delivering on average more than two olympic swimming pools of water per second. * (Required, Multiple choice)

With some 50 dams and water diversions whose constructions began in the 19th century, the environmental flow of the Ottawa River dropped from 10:1 to 5:1 * (Required, Multiple choice)