Every person on earth lives in a watershed. Watersheds have linked nature and the services it provides with human communities since the beginning of time.

As a larger percentage of our population moves to cities (60% of humanity is expected to live in urban areas by 2030), people will demand more from the watersheds that support these cities.

Today, it is widely recognized that an integrated approach to freshwater management offers the best means of reconciling competing demands. Watersheds or river basins offer the obvious boundaries in which to develop integrated plans - plans that must transcend political boundaries in many cases.

Far Reaching Solutions

Protecting watersheds is of the utmost importance to human well-being and a priority of The Nature Conservancy. The Conservancy provides a voice for science to help partners  understand how watersheds function, works with these partners to develop policies and practices supportive of watershed protection, and provides innovative mechanisms for financing conservation activities in watersheds.

The Conservancy is working to take its extensive experience from demonstration projects to define "best practices" that can be adopted globally in water and watershed management, bringing the best science and policy solutions to countries and governments around the world.  

Tools and Resources

Technologies including the Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration (IHA) software, flow restoration database and the Regime Prescription Tool (RPT) to aide freshwater practitioners can be found by clicking here.

Journal Articles about Freshwater Conservation

Suggested articles for Watersheds Practitioners:

Richter, Brian. 2007. Meeting urban water demands while protecting rivers: A case study from the Rivanna River in Virgina.Journal AWWA, June 2007, 24-26.

FitzHugh, T.W. and B.D. Richter. 2004. Quenching urban thirst: growing cities and their impacts on freshwater ecosystems. Bioscience 54 (8): 741-754. (.pdf, 1.1 MB)
(This paper is posted with the permission of the The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS).)

Baron, J.S., N.L. Poff, P.L. Angermeier, C.N. Dahm, P.H. Gleick, N.G. Hairston, R.B. Jackson, C.A. Johnston, B.D. Richter, and A.D. Steinman. 2002. Meeting ecological and societal needs for freshwater. Ecological Applications 12:1247-1260.
View the paper (.pdf, 196 kb)
(This paper is posted with the permission of the Ecological Society of America.)