Salem Sound Watershed
Salem Sound Watershed
Understanding Our Watershed
Salem Sound’s magnificent natural resources are comprised of open ocean, beaches, marshes, rivers, streams, and perhaps not as obviously the land that sheds its water into them.
What happens on the land affects the ocean. With our mission to improve the water quality of Salem Sound, we need to understand and work within its watershed, the land area that drains into the ocean.
A watershed is the area of land where all the water that falls in it and drains off it goes to a common outlet, in our case, Salem Sound. In turn, Salem Sound is an embayment in Massachusetts Bay and part of the larger Gulf of Maine and the western North Atlantic Ocean. Rain, snow, and groundwater (if not evaporated or captured) flow downhill into brooks, ponds, lakes, and rivers eventually ending in estuaries and embayments such as Salem Sound.
The Salem Sound Watershed consists of land mainly in 6 communities – Marblehead, Salem, Peabody, Danvers, Beverly, and Manchester-by-the-Sea, but small areas of Swampscott, Hamilton, Essex, and Gloucester also are in this watershed.
Salem Sound watershed rivers include the Danvers River (Danvers), Bass River (Beverly), North River (Peabody & Salem), South River (Salem), Chubb Creek (Beverly & Manchester-by-the-Sea), Sawmill Brook (Manchester-by-the-Sea), and Forest River (Salem & Marblehead).
An estuary is a partially enclosed coastal body of brackish water with one or more rivers or brooks flowing into it with a free connection to the open sea. Estuaries form a transition zone between river and maritime environments, thus providing greater biodiversity opportunities.
The Forest River is a good example of an estuary. It begins upland west of Highland Avenue in Salem, flows along Swampscott Road into the southern portion of Salem Woods, then into Salem’s Forest River Conservation Area where it becomes brackish as it mixes with the Salem Harbor tides. As it flows between Marblehead’s Forest River Conservation Area and Salem, it is bordered by salt marshes that are home to a diversity of species. It passes through tide gates as it enters Salem Harbor at the Lead Mills. A small tributary flows into the Forest River from Salem State University’s Old Creek marsh.
Facts:
• Salem Sound watershed covers 43,000 hectares (over 106,255 acres) and is home to 192,000 people.
• Salem Sound is a 3,660 hectares (9,044 acres) coastal embayment.
• Danvers and North Rivers contribute the largest volumes of fresh water to the Sound.
• Much of the Salem Sound watershed is impervious, hardened surfaces (such as buildings and pavement) that do not let precipitation infiltrate into the ground to feed the rivers.
• Two wastewater treatment facilities discharge into Salem Sound.
Living Land Acknowledgement
Salem Sound Coastwatch acknowledges the people of the Massachusett Tribe as the original inhabitants of the land that surrounds what we now call Salem Sound. As they continue to honor and hold this land into the present, protecting sacred places and the environment, there is much that people living here today can and should learn from Indigenous Ways.
As we work to foster stewardship and the sacredness of the land and water as do the Massachusett People, we seek to honor their truth, make the invisible visible, and correct the American stories that erase indigenous people’s tribal history and culture.
In doing this, SSCW will continue to bring to light the history and current presence of a marginalized people and seeks to be involved with the Massachusett Tribe to share their history and knowledge with the current residents of Salem Sound and the North Shore.