Resilient rivers: Watershed-based management of forests, freshwater, and inland fisheries

Focusing on freshwater systems, this course inspires managers, scientists, and community members to work across disciplines and watersheds. The course coaches learners to understand, monitor, and manage watersheds as integrated systems. Lessons begin with watershed function and then focus on forests, freshwater, and fisheries. In each case emphasizing interlinkages, spatial structure, seasonality, benefits to humans, and simple monitoring indicators. Project work in the upper Kafue River watershed, one of the headwaters of the Zambezi River in Zambia, and in the Magdalena and Atrato Rivers, Colombia, offer local perspectives and convincing case studies for understanding and managing on-the-ground conditions.

Learning Objectives

• Principles and ideas for multidisciplinary management across watersheds.
• Interlinkages between forestry, freshwater, climate, fisheries, and the riparian communities who depend on them as well as why watershed-based management is a key to sustainability.
• Ideas for developing indicators that can support monitoring of forests, freshwater, and fisheries as well as guidance for initiating a watershed management plan.