Building Virtual Watersheds: A Global Opportunity to Strengthen Resource Management and Conservation.

Modern land-use planning and conservation strategies at landscape to country scales worldwide require complete and accurate digital representations of river networks, encompassing all channels including the smallest headwaters. The digital river networks, integrated with widely available digital elevation models, also need to have analytical capabilities to support resource management and conservation, including attributing river segments with key stream and watershed data, characterizing topography to identify landforms, discretizing land uses at scales necessary to identify human-environment interactions, and connecting channels downstream and upstream, and to terrestrial environments. We investigate the completeness and analytical capabilities of national to regional scale digital river networks that are available in five countries: Canada, China, Russia, Spain, and United States using actual resource management and conservation projects involving 12 university, agency, and NGO organizations.

Postfire logging in riparian areas.

We reviewed the behavior of wildfire in riparian zones, primarily in the western United States, and the potential ecological consequences of postfire logging. Fire behavior in riparian zones is complex, but many aquatic and riparian organisms exhibit a suite of adaptations that allow relatively rapid recovery after fire. Unless constrained by other factors, fish tend to rebound relatively quickly, usually within a decade after a wildfire.