Resources
Most issues surrounding freshwater are so complex that no single discipline can tackle those problems alone. To respond to growing interest in this field, we’ve put together a series of resources to highlight collaborative programs currently making freshwater research relevant to scientists, decision-makers, and the public alike.
Articles
- An Alarming Glimpse Into a Future of Historic Droughts
- The system that moves water around the Earth is off balance for the first time in human history
- Half the world’s countries have degraded freshwater systems, UN finds
- How Years of Government Failures Caused a Flood ‘Worse Than Boko Haram’
- Water demand is rising fast. Yet few realize how it impacts the climate crisis
- Why the Earth’s water cycle is under threat
- Designing and managing protected and conserved areas to support inland water ecosystems and biodiversity
- Loss of spring moisture a culprit for missing water in Colorado River
- How can we save the ‘world’s most important’ river?
- An Alarming Glimpse Into a Future of Historic Droughts
- Hood Canal salmon run sees booming recovery as fish face extinction
- More Than Half of Contiguous U.S. River Water Comes from Ephemeral Streams
- Navigating the Rapid Rivers of Policy
- Inside the plan to build a new dam and reservoir in WA
- Can continental transboundary compacts hold water?
- Just add sewage: How a bone-dry river bed became a thriving haven for desert wildlife
- Reframing the role of water for a more climate-resilient Middle East
- The Intensifying Impacts of Upstream Dams on the Mekong
- Conflicts Over Water Soared to New High Last Year
- Peak water in an era of climate change
- Protecting People & Property: The World’s Largest Dam Rehabilitation Program
- Why isn’t Colorado’s snowpack ending up in the Colorado River? New research suggests the problem might be the lack of spring rainfall
- Not politics, not interest rates: India’s surging economy at risk from water
- Restoring chalk streams in a changing climate
- There’s a new top fish of the Columbia River — and it doesn’t mind the warm water
- Forests, Water, and Livelihoods in the Lesser Himalaya
- Rivers of Ruin: Destructive Floods Ravage Tanzania
- Water specialist, hydrologist, fisheries technician. These jobs are on the front lines of responding to climate change.
- Breaking the menstruation taboo to make fieldwork more inclusive
- Unraveling the Scientific Mismatch: The Amazon’s Surprising Drought Response
- When Hydropower Runs Dry
- NASA’s New Global Accounting of Earth’s Rivers Reveals “Fingerprints” of Intense Water Use
- When rivers run low: Unraveling the hidden consequences of damming and hydrological drought
- Failure to share scientific data is undermining efforts to protect major Asian rivers
- Understanding the Water Flows of the Nile River
- Klamath River Reservoirs Drained for World’s Largest Dam Removal Project
- How Climate Change Will Transform River Flows and Landscapes
- Scientists confine, study Chinook at restored Snoqualmie River habitat
- Unlocking Tomorrow’s Water Secrets Through Sci-Fi
- How one river in south Puget Sound tells the story of salmon’s plight
- River Recovery from Drought Can Take Years
- Climate Change Turns African Rivers into Epicentres of Conflict
- The Great Sediment Shortfall: Why Rivers Can’t Rescue Coastal Wetlands
- Water is central in achieving all 17 SDGs. But how?
- Rivers Are Warming Up and Losing Oxygen
- Rethinking river restoration: a challenge for freshwater ecology
- The Rio Grande isn’t just a border – it’s a river in crisis
- Unlocking the Secrets of Floods: Breakthroughs in Riverine and Coastal Modeling
- Rivers at Risk: How Climate Chaos Is Tainting Our Waters
- As the Arctic Warms, These Rivers Are Slowing Down
- Bangladesh, a river delta nation, is on the front line of climate change. Its coping strategies could offer lessons for the wider world.
- Can you put a price on one of the most important rivers in the world? Some researchers are giving it a shot
- The Colorado River Is Shrinking. See What’s Using All the Water.
- Scientists Chart Transformation of Klamath River and Its Salmon Amid Nation’s Largest Dam Removal Project
- Europe’s next crisis: Water
- A Severe Drought Pushes an Imperiled Amazon to the Brink
- A New Age of Water is Dawning
- Uruguay Wasn’t Supposed to Run Out of Water
- In Cambodia, a Battered Mekong Defies Doomsday Predictions
- How Native Americans Will Shape the Future of Water in the West
- Is building more dams the way to save rivers?
- A new method assesses health of Chile’s headwaters, and it’s not good news
- Reimagining river futures by reshaping water infrastructure
- ‘This is what a river should look like’: Dutch rewilding project turns back the clock 500 years
- The Controversial Plan to Unleash the Mississippi River
- Climate Change Is Ravaging the Colorado River. There’s a Model to Avert the Worst. Success in the Yakima River Basin in Washington
- For business, water scarcity is where climate change hits home
- A growing movement to reclaim water rights for Indigenous people
- Slow water: can we tame urban floods by going with the flow?
- Rivers can suddenly change course – scientists used 50 years of satellite images to learn where and how it happens
- Why a Global Price on Freshwater Might be Needed in the Climate Change Era
- To Revive a River, Restore Its Hidden Gut: Radical reconstruction in Seattle is bringing nearly dead urban streams back to productive life
Academic Papers
- Hydropower impacts on riverine biodiversity
- Climate and landform interact to control the source and transport of nitrate in Pacific Northwest rivers
- Unpacking Climate Policy: A guide to assessing policy effectiveness and applying insights to climate solutions journalism in five steps
- A Network Design Approach for Citizen Science-Satellite Monitoring of Surface Water Volume Changes in Bangladesh
- Past and recent anthropogenic pressures drive rapid changes in riverine fish communities
- Examining the Impact of Stream Permanence on Headwater Stream Carbon Emissions
- ResORR: A Globally Scalable and Satellite Data-driven Algorithm for River Flow Regulation due to Reservoir Operations
- The future of global river health monitoring
- Integrating terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to constrain estimates of land-atmosphere carbon exchange
- Restoring the Mesopotamian Rivers for Future Generations: A Practical Approach
- Quantification of wetland vegetation communities features with airborne AVIRIS-NG, UAVSAR, and UAV LiDAR data in Peace-Athabasca Delta
- Global investigation of lake habitat coupling by fishes
- Shifting taxonomic and functional community composition of rivers under land use change
- A Network Design Approach for Citizen Science-Satellite Monitoring of Surface Water Volume Changes in Bangladesh
- How low can you go? Widespread challenges in measuring low stream discharge and a path forward
- The importance of hydrology in routing terrestrial carbon to the atmosphere via global streams and rivers
- Optimizing Amazonian damns for nature
- Predicting the Likely Thermal Impact of Current and Future Dams Around the World
- Coupled CH4 production and oxidation support CO2 supersaturation in a tropical flood pulse lake (Tonle Sap Lake, Cambodia)
- Declining Greenness in Arctic-Boreal Lakes
- Multi-scale threat assessment of riverine ecosystems in the Colorado River Basin
- A Multidecadal Analysis of Reservoir Storage Change in Developing Regions
- Modeling the freshwater ecological response to changes in flow and thermal regimes influenced by reservoir dynamics
- Ecological stability propagates across spatial scales and trophic levels in freshwater ecosystems
- Reimagining the Surface Water and Ocean Topography Mission as the “Landsat” of Surface Water
- Causes, Responses, and Implications of Anthropogenic versus Natural Flow Intermittence in River Networks
- A reconstruction of parasite burden reveals one century of climate-associated parasite decline
- Operational forecasting inundation extents using REOF analysis (FIER) over lower Mekong and its potential economic impact on agriculture
- River–lake connectivity, wetland, and human stress factors shape fish diversity (alpha and beta) patterns in the middle and lower Yangtze River, China
- The Global Youth Statement Declaration for Climate Justice
- Europe’s state of water 2024: the need for improved water resilience
- Incorporating Natural Infrastructure in Bogotá’s Water System
- Planetary Health Check: A Scientific Assessment of the State of the Planet
- Tracking Agricultural Transitions in the Colorado River Basin
- Yaa Heen Koosge: Indigenous Peoples and Water Wisdom
- Evolution of river regimes in the Mekong River basin over 8 decades and the role of dams in recent hydrological extremes
- Anthropogenic climate change has influenced global river flow seasonality
- Resilient riverine social–ecological systems: A new paradigm to meet global conservation targets
- Analysing and evaluating environmental flows through hydrological methods in the regulated Indus River Basin
- Quantifying the effects of institutional shifts on water governance in the Yellow River Basin: A social-ecological system perspective
- Water-energy-food planning and operations framework for river basins with a case study on the Blue Nile
- Recent intensified erosion and massive sediment deposition in Tibetan Plateau rivers
- A triple increase in global river basins with water scarcity due to future pollution
- From local knowledge to decision making in climate change adaptation at basin scale. Application to the Jucar River Basin, Spain
- Large sinuous rivers are slowing down in a warming Arctic
- Rethinking river water temperature in a changing, human-dominated world
- Data, knowledge, and modeling challenges for science-informed management of river deltas
- Global river water quality under climate change and hydroclimatic extremes
- Modelling the climate change impacts on river discharge and inundation extent in the Magdalena River basin – Colombia
- The future of global river health monitoring
- Cooperative adaptive management of the Nile River with climate and socio-economic uncertainties
- Rapid changes to global river suspended sediment flux by humans
- Riverscapes as natural infrastructure: Meeting challenges of climate adaptation and ecosystem restoration
- Transboundary river basins: Scenarios of hydropower development and operation under extreme climate conditions
- Integrated modelling to assess the impacts of water stress in a transboundary river basin: Bridging local-scale water resource operations to a river basin economy
- Global prevalence of non-perennial rivers and streams
- Global rates and patterns of channel migration in river deltas
Science Communication Resources
- This urgent ad shows how climate change visuals are changing
- How prominent science communicators on YouTube understand the impact of their work
- Science in ASL is a whole different language: Interpreters in STEM
- The power of storytelling for water and climate
- Going beyond “just the facts” towards a narrative in your science communication
- A key ingredient for SciComm: listening
- What Hollywood can teach researchers about scientific storytelling
- Science Communication: What Does Your Online Presence Say About You?
- Step back from scientific hubris: Q&A on water research
- Engaging Science Communication Books
- What do we mean by SciComm anyway?
- Half-life your message: A quick flexible tool for message discovery
- Top tips for getting your science out there
Books
- Pushing the Paradigm of Global Water Security edited by Victoria Anker; Rachael Maysels; Maria Valasia Peppa
- Big River: Resilience and Renewal in the Columbia Basin by Eileen Delehanty Pearkes
- Keeping the Chattahoochee: Reviving and Defending a Great Southern River by Sally Sierer Bethea
- Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists by Leah Penniman
- Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity by Sandra Postel
- Indigenous Environmental Justice Edited by Karen Jarratt-Snider and Marianne O. Nielsen
- Rivers of Power by Laurence C. Smith
- Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
- The River That Made Seattle: A Human and Natural History of the Duwamish by B.J. Cummings
- Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities by Ingrid R.G. Waldron
- Mississippi Solo by Eddy Harris
- Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained: Rethinking City-River Relationships Edited By Martin Knoll, Uwe Lubken and Dieter Schott
- Globalization of Water: Sharing the Planet’s Freshwater Resources by Arjen Y. Hoekstra and Ashok K. Chapagain
- Water: A Biography by Giulio Boccaletti
- Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice Cleo Wolfe-Hazard
- Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of drought and Deluge by Erica Gies
- To Be a Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers by Winona LaDuke
- The Flow: Rivers, Water, and Wildness by Amy-Jane Beer
- In the Watershed: A Journey Down Maumee River by Ryan Schnurr
- Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century by Randall Kenan
Storymaps
- The Economics of Water: Valuing the Hydrological Cycle as a Global Common Good
- Resilience on Seattle’s Waterfront
- International Watersheds Initiative Storymap
- The Hardest-Working River in the West
- Montana’s Legacy of River Protection: Six Dams That Were Never Built
- Imagining Climate Resilience in the Pacific Northwest
- The Andean Amazon
- Explore Our Great Rivers
Media
- UW Center for Environmental Health Equity Environmental and Energy Justice in Tribal Communities Webinar Series
- Audacious Water: A podcast about how we can build a world of water abundance for everyone
- Wild Hope Series: The Beautiful Undammed (Elwha River)
- Into the Amazon
- At the Water Table: Conversations with River Network
- The Indigenous Planetary Health Podcast
- Climate Creators to Watch in 2024
- Covenant of the Salmon People
- Freshwater
- Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors
- The International River Foundation and the Australian Water Partnership First Nations Voices for Rivers series
- Fifth National Climate Assessment Art x Climate Gallery
- The Water Talk Podcast
- Understanding the Global Supply of Water
- Power of the River
- The River Radius Episode 48: What is a River 2022?
- Countermapping
- TEDxSeattle: Connecting to climate change through music
- Indigenous Knowledge Meets Science to Solve Climate Change
- Paya: The Water Story of the Paiute
- Virtual Water Gallery
- Rio Grande: A Photo Essay
- Building Resilient Communities with Indigenous People Podcast: Impact Earth – Water
- Lost Women of Science Podcast
Other Resources
- Utrecht University and National Geographic World Water Map
- Intermittent Rivers: A Graphical Overview
- STREAM: Satellite-based analysis Tool for Rapid Evaluation of Aquatic environMents
- Water Hub
- Climate & Health Evidence Bank
- Pacific Institute Water Conflict Chronology
- Indigenous Women’s Leadership Network
- America’s Most Endangered Rivers of 2024: A Call to Action for Clean Water
- 2024 Value of Water Index
- Water & Equity Mapping Tools
- Native Nations Institute Indigenous Governance Database
- Resilient Rivers Hub: Connecting physical and social science datasets
- Water Loop: a nonprofit media outlet covering sustainability and equity in water
- Field Inclusive: Amplifying and Supporting Marginalized and Historically Excluded Biologists and Researchers
- Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange
- Center for Indigenous Fisheries
- Community of Women in Water
- WhiteSwan Environmental Digital Ecocultural Mapping Project
- The Internet of Water Coalition
- The Global Flood Database
- Water Tracker for National Climate Planning
- Games for Sustainability: Water Games
- OpenET: Filling the Biggest Data Gap in Water Management
- Freshwater Ecoregions of the World
- The Freshwater Health Index
- The Fisheries Blog
- gage: Women and Gender Diverse Professionals in STEMM
- The Nature Conservancy Sustainable Rivers Program
- Transboundary Water Portal