"watercourses" is a correct and usable word in written English.
You can use the word to refer to streams, rivers, or other bodies of water that flow over land. For example, "The watercourses of the region are fed by melting snow from the peaks of the nearby mountains."
Its presence today within Britain's arterial watercourses, crisscrossing county boundaries, between town and country, makes this powerhouse of a bird a force to bring us closer together".
But the environmental cost was huge: the insecticide and oil-polluted watercourses killed other animals too.
Fallow areas, uncropped parts, watercourses, dirt tracks and wetlands also need to be fed into the system.
Much is washed off by rain, ending up in local watercourses where dissolved nutrients can cause algal blooms and kill fish.
Before it can be released back into the nearby watercourses it has to meet stringent standards, including maximum levels of ammonia, heavy metals and any chemicals that might cause oxygen depletion.
GIVEN the industrial invasion that the North American Free-Trade Agreement has brought to the cities that line Mexico's border with the United States, one might expect the skies of Ciudad Juarez to be brown with pollution, and its watercourses solid with toxic sludge.
Reading the glossary, I was amazed by the compressive elegance of its lexis, and its capacity for fine discrimination: a caochan, for instance, is "a slender moor-stream obscured by vegetation such that it is virtually hidden from sight", while a feadan is "a small stream running from a moorland loch", and a fèith is "a fine vein-like watercourse running through peat, often dry in the summer".
It also funds a shadow budget that squanders money by smothering almost every hillside and watercourse in concrete, and by building bridges and roads that lead nowhere useful.
This new watercourse, over a decade in the making, will push 13 billion cubic metres of water more than 1,200km from the Danjiangkou dam in the central province of Hubei to the capital, Beijing.
Though pleased with their own performance, the Greens are not likely to find much common ground with National when they come to such cherished issues as agricultural emissions and rural watercourse pollution.
A notable underground watercourse in Derbyshire is the River Wye, which disappears into Plunge Hole and then traverses Poole's Hole, near Buxton.
