While you’re at the water’s edge, I’d like you to pause in your search and take a look at your surroundings. You may have had a hard time finding a place to safely get into the channel due to its very steep sides. It’s also likely that the rocks and logs you flipped were covered in silt or algae and you may notice plastic trash littered along the waterway. These are all symptoms of the Urban Stream Syndrome. Streams suffering from this all-to-common illness have steep, eroded banks, poor water quality, and scoured beds. Because they drain urban and suburban watersheds that are covered in large part by impervious surfaces – roads, driveways, parking lots, and buildings – they receive huge amounts of polluted runoff that downcuts channels and washes away microhabitats and the creatures that depend on them, including larval salamanders.
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