Books

Scroll down to find information and ordering information for Rivers for Life, A Practitioners Guide to Freshwater Biodiversity Conservation and A Methods Guide

Rivers for Life: Managing Water for People and Nature
by Sandra Postel and Brian Richter (2005, Island Press)

To place an order go to the Island Press web site.
To learn more, read the brochure (.pdf, 126 kb).

Rivers for Life is now available in Chinese from http://www.yrcp.com/, and in Japanese from Shinju Sha at 1-23-5, Mejirodai, Bunkyo-ku Tokyo. The publisher's number is 3941-2103, and fax is 3941-2207.

The conventional approach to river protection has focused on water quality and maintaining some "minimum" flow that was thought necessary to ensure the viability of a river. In recent years, however, scientific research has underscored the idea that the ecological health of a river system depends not on a minimum amount of water at any one time but on the naturally variable quantity and timing of flows throughout the year.

In Rivers for Life, leading water experts Sandra Postel and Brian Richter explain why restoring and preserving more natural river flows are key to sustaining freshwater biodiversity and healthy river systems, and describe innovative policies, scientific approaches, and management reforms for achieving those goals.

The authors:

• explain the value of healthy rivers to human and ecosystem health
• describe the ecological processes that support river ecosystems and how they have been
• disrupted by dams, diversions, and other alterations
• consider the scientific basis for determining how much water a river needs
• examine new management paradigms focused on restoring flow patterns and sustaining ecological health
• assess the policy options available for managing rivers and other freshwater systems explore building blocks for better river governance

They offer case studies of river management from the United States (the San Pedro, Green, and Missouri), Australia (the Brisbane), Puerto Rico (the Espíritu Santo) and South Africa (the Sabie), along with numerous examples of new and innovative policy approaches that are being implemented in those and other countries.

Rivers for Life presents a global perspective on the challenges of managing water for people and nature, with a concise yet comprehensive overview of the relevant science, policy, and management issues. It presents exciting and inspirational information for anyone concerned with water policy, planning and management, river conservation, freshwater biodiversity, or related topics.

If you wish to learn more about this publication, read the report about An Evening with Sandra Postel & Brian Richter, New York Academy of Sciences, January 20, 2004, by Christine Van Lenten.

A Practitioner's Guide to Freshwater Biodiversity Conservation
by Nicole Silk and Kristine Ciruna, Eds. (July 2004, The Nature Conservancy)

Conserving freshwater biodiversity presents unique challenges for conservation practitioners. Meeting these challenges requires understanding how freshwater ecosystems are formed and how they function. It requires identifying the best strategies to pursue in the face of existing threats to freshwater ecosystems and identified conservation targets. And, the strategies selected must be scale appropriate. Usually these strategies are very different from what practitioners might pursue to conserve land-based targets. Practitioners not specialized in freshwater biodiversity conservation may have little experience from which to base their efforts.

A Practitioner's Guide to Freshwater Biodiversity Conservation was developed to help conservation practitioners become better able to meet the challenges specific to freshwater biodiversity conservation.

• presents information about the global challenge of freshwater biodiversity conservation
• explores how freshwater ecosystems are structured and function to support this biodiversity
• explains approaches for identifying the most important freshwater biodiversity to protect
• describes the four primary causes of freshwater bidiversity decline (water use and management, land use and management, invasive alien species, and fisheries management and overharvesting)
• presents comprehensive information about a wide range of strategies at various institutional and geographic scales to abate these threats
• describes design considerations and methods for measuring freshwater conservation success within an adaptive management framework.

The information included in this guide is based on a comprehensive review of practitioner experience from around the world and draws from knowledge gained through The Nature Conservancy's Freshwater Initiative between 1998 and 2003.

No other book currently available presents as comprehensive a review of information related to freshwater biodiverisity conservation.

To place an order go to the Island Press web site or download the order form (PDF).

A Methods Guide

By Stephen B. Olsen, Tiruponithura V. Padma, Brian D. Richter

Estuaries play a critical role in the functioning of the planet. They are already heavily stressed by the growing intensity of human activity in the world's coastal regions. These pressures are being further amplified by growing demands on the planet's limited supplies of freshwater-causing inflows to estuaries to be reduced, polluted, or eliminated. Yet, freshwater is the lifeblood of every estuary. It is the basis for their uniquely complex functioning and the extraordinary wealth of goods and
services that they provide to humanity.

There is an urgent need to implement approaches to integrated water resources management that begin by recognizing the need to allocate sufficient freshwater to sustain rivers and estuaries as healthy ecosystems and then make allocations for additional human needs. This guide describes a step-by-step process that links the catchment to its estuary and proceeds from issue definition and planning, to winning formal commitment to IWRM policies and procedures and on to implementation. Each step describes the priority actions that integrate the best available science with a participatory and transparent management process. To succeed and generate long-term societal and environmental benefits, the approach described in this guide must be implemented over many decades. As expressions of adaptive ecosystem management, IWRM programs must adapt to changing conditions and to their own experience.

They should be sources of new knowledge. In such long-term efforts, it is important to publicly celebrate successes-particularly when positive results come from local initiatives and local creativity in problem solving