What is a Watershed? 

 A watershed is an area of land that drains to particular stream, river, lake or ocean. Everyone lives in a watershed!

Basically, watersheds function like a basin, with many starting points that drain downhill to one end point. After a rain or snow fall, water flows over land, draining to the lowest elevation. Small watersheds always form part of a larger watershed; for example, the Doan Brook watershed drains into the Lake Erie watershed, which then becomes the St. Lawrence Seaway watershed, until it reaches the Atlantic Ocean.We like to think of the Doan Brook watershed as our "ecological address." Do you know your ecological address?

What is a Sewershed?

A sewershed is an area that drains into a sanitary or combined sewer system. A sewershed is generally related to the surface watershed, but doesn’t need to correspond exactly. For Doan Brook, the sewershed is the area over which the sanitary sewers drain to the Main Doan Valley Interceptor (DVI), a large combined sewer line that parallels Doan Brook in the lower watershed area of the City of Cleveland.

What makes up the Doan Brook Watershed? 

The Doan Brook watershed encompasses about a 12 square mile area in the eastern metropolitan area of Cleveland, Ohio. Over 149,000 human residents call our watershed “home,” as well as numerous species of birds, mammals, pollution-tolerant fish, amphibians, and reptiles. Doan Brook’s three branches form the heart of the Shaker Lakes park system, uniting to flow west and northwest through Rudy Rodgers Memorial Park, Rockefeller Park and the Cleveland Cultural Gardens.

The watershed basin includes parts of Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights, the University Circle area of Cleveland, plus portions of the Fairfax, Hough, Glenville and St. Clair-Superior neighborhoods. It drains into Lake Erie at the Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve, formerly Dike 14. 

How has the Watershed Changed?

As the Doan Brook watershed was developed over the last 200 years, the natural water balance has been altered significantly. Natural habitats, primarily forests and wetlands, have been replaced with roads, driveways, parking lots and buildings. These, hard, or impervious surfaces, prevent rainwater from percolating through the soil to ground water.

During heavy rain and snow falls, the volume and velocity of runoff is much higher than in pre-development days, often causing unusually large floods in University Circle. The average annual runoff to the brook is about three times larger than in Nathaniel Doan's time. The extra watershed area added by the diversion of Giddings Brook, which originally ran directly into Lake Erie, to the Doan Brook sewershed further increases runoff volume.