Chicopee River Watershed Assessment
The Chicopee River watershed drains more than 720 square miles of central Massachusetts before joining the Connecticut River, and includes all or part of 39 cities and towns with a combined population of about 200,000. The Massachusetts Riverways Program (Riverways), an office within the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game, established two goals for the Chicopee River watershed project. The first goal was to obtain baseline data and assessments of 15 "degraded" streams and one high quality "reference " stream. The second goal was to pilot test the applicability of the Rapid Stream Assessment Technique (RSAT) to Massachusetts streams. The RSAT method had originally been developed by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments for use in Montgomery County, Maryland. One of the reasons that Riverways chose the Chicopee River watershed was that it contains a wide variety of stream types and habitats, ranging from heavily urbanized areas with highly degraded streams to very rural areas with relatively undisturbed streams "? conditions that would truly test the RSAT applicability to Massachusetts streams.
