Ecological Water Science, Law, Policy, and Awareness: Instream Flow and Water Level Conservation - 50 Years of Challenges and Progress

Sufficient amounts of clean water are essential to life.  Whether and how we choose to manage surface and subsurface water sources will potentially impact water quantity and quality for all water uses associated with water withdrawals, diversions, impoundments, and instream flow and water level conservation.

Governmental, non-governmental organizations, and private sector water stakeholders initiated actions to formally quantify and legally recognize instream flow and water level use conservation under state, federal, and tribal authorities in the 1960s. Despite advancement of science, legal, regulatory, policy, and stakeholder comprehension, many of the initial challenges impeding conservation of sufficient flows and water levels remain today as highlighted at the Portland, OR 2015 workshop: “FLOW 2015-Protecting Rivers and Lakes in the Face of Uncertainty” sponsored by the Instream Flow Council. 

This presentation will provide summaries and highlights of “FLOW 2015” and of one of the earliest instream flow and water level workshops held in the U.S. in Boise, ID in 1976, “Instream Flow Needs: Solutions to Technical, Legal and Social Problems Caused by Increasing Competition for Limited Streamflow” sponsored by the Western Division of the American Fisheries Society and the Power Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

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