BirdTrout

Muskingum River Watershed, Ohio

4,287 miles of mapped stream across 1,566 square miles of drainage in Muskingum, Morgan, Washington, Perry, Coshocton, Licking, Noble, Knox counties, in 196 named streams. Ohio designates 140 of those miles as trout water, on 35 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 05040004 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 4,287); 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 196 of them, longest first. 26 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

47,130 acres in 10 units, which is 4.7% of the 1,002,280 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.

• Tri-valley Wa 15,504.1 ac
• Woodbury Wildlife Area 20,112.4 ac
• Blue Rock State Forest 4,530.0 ac
• Wolf Creek Wildlife Area 4,032.9 ac
• Perry State Forest 4,797.5 ac
• Powelson Wildlife Area 2,777.7 ac
• Powelson Wildlife Area 2,752.9 ac
• Muskingum River State Park 1,975.5 ac
• Wilds Land Acquisition 2,025.3 ac
• Park 715.3 ac

Neighbouring watersheds

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

• Tuscarawas 05040001
• Walhonding 05040003