Establishing quantitative criteria for environmental flows—water needed to sustain biodiversity and the services that healthy freshwater ecosystems support—is essential to reversing worldwide trends in freshwater ecosystem degradation. Yet, environmental flow programs tend to be narrowly focused on the habitat needs of threatened and endangered species. Flow programs are also often limited in spatial scale and may not address the watershed processes that control habitat or population dynamics across the ecological gradients present in rivers and estuaries. This session aims to highlight novel research around the functions, values, and methods to support environmental flows in rivers and estuaries. We are interested in presentations of case-studies, field-based investigations, and modeling applications that explore the effects of flow management interventions on ecosystem functions and consequences for species of interest, other indicators of ecosystem health, and ecosystem services and values.
Organizer: Joshua Israel, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, [email protected]
Co-organizers: Ted Grantham, Joshua Israel