Old Woman Creek, on the south-central shore of Lake Erie, is one of Ohio’s few remaining examples of a natural estuary and is designated as a National Estuarine Research Reserve and a Ohio State Nature Preserve. It is the only Great Lakes freshwater estuary in the National Estuarine Research Reserve System and is managed cooperatively by NOAA and the ODNR.

Pipe Creek is a small tributary to Sandusky Bay on the south-central shore of Lake Erie. The Pipe Creek watershed is largely developed by a combination of urban and agricultural land uses. Pipe Creek is best known for its 97 acre State Wildlife Area located at the mouth of Pipe Creek, which was constructed in the early 1990s as a mitigation site for wetlands destroyed by development elsewhere.

This report card summarizes 2009 water quality results, which are based on data collected by the Chester River Association and various partners. It helps to clarify the Chester River's health in both tidal and non-tidal regions, and provides information on what individuals can do to help improve water quality.

The Chesapeake Bay Program and its partners developed an improved stream health indicator that provides a regional assessment of benthic (bottom-dwelling) macroinvertebrate community health. Benthic data collected in different ways by various natural resource agencies were incorporated into a Benthic Index of Biotic Integrity that rates stream health across the entire 64,000 square miles of watershed that drain into Chesapeake Bay.

This newsletter describes the second annual Chester River report card. The Chester River Estuary received an overall grade of D and the Chester River creeks received an overall grade of C+. In addition to the grades, the newsletter includes information on increased monitoring, provides a comparison of a healthy and unhealthy Chester River, and suggests actions that citizens can take to improve the health of the Chester River.