BirdTrout

Lower Scioto River Watershed, Ohio

4,964 miles of mapped stream across 2,175 square miles of drainage in Pike, Ross, Pickaway, Scioto, Madison, Hocking, Jackson, Adams counties, in 258 named streams. Ohio designates 124 of those miles as trout water, on 26 streams.

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Public land — where the bank is open to walk and fish

USGS gauge — live water temperature

Water temperature — the colour of every stream in the basin

58 64 70

50°F and colder is cold, through cold-transitional and cool, to warm above 70°F — the same four bands the app paints. On this map the colour is nothing at all: Ohio EPA publishes no thermal classification, so every stream on this map draws grey. The gauge dots are the one exception and they read live. Grey is every stream here, for the reason above.

The watershed in numbers

HUC8 05060002 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

Cold, cool and warm water

Ohio publishes no thermal class. What Ohio EPA publishes is an aquatic life use under OAC 3745-1 — Coldwater, Exceptional Warmwater, Warmwater, Modified Warmwater or Limited Resource Habitat — assigned on fish and macroinvertebrate survey scores. It describes the community the water supports, not the temperature it runs at. It covers 0% of this basin's stream miles (0.0 of 4,964); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

Ohio EPA publishes no thermal classification of any stream in the state, so this page has no cold/cool/warm breakdown and none is inferred from the aquatic life use. The coldwater designation is a habitat and management call — OAC 3745-1-07(B)(1)(f) covers both waters holding native coldwater fauna and waters ODNR runs a trout programme on that could be restored to coldwater — and reading a July temperature out of it would be this site inventing one. Ohio water draws grey on the live map; grey means unmeasured.

Every named stream in the basin

All 258 of them, longest first. 16 have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. The class column is Ohio EPA's designation of that stream. It is not a temperature: this state publishes none, so every row reads untyped in the thermal column. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.

Public land in the watershed

128,005 acres in 22 units, which is 9.2% of the 1,392,036 acres the basin covers. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.

The biggest named blocks of it, each with its own page — the streams on that ground, what is open to hunt on it, and where the access sites are.

• Tar Hollow State Forest 16,898.4 ac
• Shawnee State Forest 69,748.8 ac
• Shawnee State Park 67,504.8 ac
• Tar Hollow State Forest 13,341.1 ac
• Brush Creek State Forest 13,267.5 ac
• Pike State Forest 12,103.7 ac
• Hocking State Forest 12,453.1 ac
• Scioto Trail State Forest 9,429.6 ac
• Deer Creek Recreation Area 7,633.8 ac
• Richland Furnace State Forest 2,542.4 ac
• Superior Wildlife Area 2,343.7 ac
• Lake Katharine Dedicated Nature Preserve 1,991.6 ac

Best time to fish

The hatch calendar for the Virginia mountains, across the state line — no insect records in this dataset are filed under Ohio, or this basin's centre falls on the far side of the border, so these are the nearest ones — the same regions the app's hatch panel uses. It is a regional record, not a survey of this watershed: nobody has counted insects basin by basin. Year-round records (midges, scuds, sculpins) are left out; they are true every month and they are not what a calendar is for.

56 insects are recorded from the Virginia mountains, across the state line. Each links to its own page, with the flies that imitate it.

Neighbouring watersheds

The subbasins that share a boundary with this one and carry coldwater streams.

• Ohio Brush-Whiteoak 05090201
• Upper Great Miami 05080001
• Upper Scioto 05060001