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Freshwater ecosystems provide countless services to people including food, drinking water and many other non-material services that are vital for human well-being and sustainable development. Yet, nowhere is the biodiversity crisis more acute than in freshwater ecosystems. Freshwater populations are declining at rates that far exceed their terrestrial and marine counterparts, and face among the highest extinction risks in the future.
Securing and expanding the U.S. protected river network to address the biodiversity crisis and ensure access to the myriad of benefits provided by healthy rivers requires a detailed understanding of where and how rivers are currently being protected.
To assist such conservation endeavors, Conservation Science Partners partnered with American Rivers to conduct the National Protected Rivers Assessment (NPRA) and develop the Protected Rivers Explorer, a publicly accessible interactive tool providing a nationwide inventory of present-day river protection status along with a series of indicators capturing the main values and threats to our nation’s rivers.
This NPRA leverages a large array of datasets capturing the different mechanisms conferring protection to rivers, including river conservation, riparian and floodplain conservation, policies focusing on endangered species, and terrestrial protected areas that incidentally protect rivers. The Protected River Index (PRI) was further developed by attributing different weights to each protection mechanism according to their potential conservation of five key ecological processes that are essential for the long-term persistence of socio-environmental values (hydrologic regime, connectivity, water quality, habitat, biotic composition). These protection mechanisms together with the PRI were then incorporated into the interactive Protected Rivers Explorer along with river value indicators, including source water, biodiversity and threats to rivers and summarized at a variety of scales (river segments, watersheds and states).
This web-based tool, for the first time ever, will allow river conservation practitioners and policymakers to understand the current state of river protection, celebrate the successes of past protection efforts and identify opportunities to invest in new and secure existing protections in the years to come. See more information on American Rivers website.
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