The Big Darby Creek Watershed

 The Big Darby Creek Watershed is one of the last refuges supporting the native animal and plant diversity that was once commonly found in many midwestern rivers. The Big Darby Creek winds and turns over more than 80 miles from its headwaters northwest of Marysville, Ohio to its confluence with the Scioto River at Circleville, Ohio.

The Big Darby Creek drains a 580 square mile watershed dominated by intensive row crop agriculture with small amounts of forest and residential communities. The watershed includes all or parts of 6 counties and numerous townships. Big Darby Creek is nationally significant and also is of local importance for recreation and other practical needs.

The Big Darby Creek is regionally and nationally significant because of its ecological and scenic qualities. It is known for its diversity of fish (over 100 species recorded) and mussels (about 40 recorded) and has been declared a State and National Scenic River. Click Here to see a map of the entire watershed and its tributaries according to the Ohio EPA.
More information on the Big Darby Creek Watershed region can be found by downloading the The Darby Book. Available themes and associated metadata for the Big Darby Creek Watershed can be found by clicking on the "Available Themes" link below.

This site allows you to access different spatial data themes of the Big Darby Creek Watershed in Ohio, and also allows you to download and import the themes in a compatible format for your geographic information system (GIS) software.

This site is funded through a grant from The Nature Conservancy and was created and is maintained by Steven I. Gordon and his research team at City and Regional Planning Program, School of Architecture at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

Additional support for this project was provided by Ohio NEMO- Ohio State University Extension.

Big Darby Creek Watershed Atlas of Map Examples

Click Here to see examples of what you can do with the GIS themes available on this site.

Description of Available GIS Formats

Shapefiles and coverages are two main formats for feature data. These formats store data in binary files and then link attributes from other files or tables to the related feature.

For more information on using GIS visit ESRI's GIS Support Center at www.gis.com

Big Darby Creek Watershed Available Themes

Click Here to see GIS themes you can download
If you are interested in contributing data to this site, please email Steve Gordon at The Ohio State University.
Other Available Online GIS Data Sources

Other Useful Watershed Links
Interactive Watershed Modeling (U.S. EPA Cooperative Agreement)
Big Darby Stream Network (Ohio EPA)
Find your watershed (Ohio EPA)
Ohio Watershed Network
Rivers Online - Big Darby Creek Information
Ohio State University Questions about data preparation should be directed to Steve Gordon. Data was assembled and site was formatted by Kelly Dufour and Sanjeev Arya. Last updated August 12, 2001. These materials may be used if appropriate credit is given to the City and Regional Planning Department, School of Architecture at The Ohio State University. Nature Conservancy