AUTHORS: Mary Khoury, The Nature Conservancy; Erik Martin, The Nature Conservancy; Mark Anderson, The Nature Conservancy; Arlene Olivero, The Nature Conservancy; Analie Barnett, The Nature Conservancy.
ABSTRACT: Over the last century, the ecological integrity of most streams and lakes has declined, and now climate change is altering historic precipitation and temperature patterns, further impacting freshwater environments. In response, The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) Center for Resilient Conservation Science engaged 60 colleagues over three years to assess river networks in the conterminous United States (CONUS) for resilience to climate change (Anderson et al. 2024). Freshwater resilience is the ability of a freshwater system to sustain biodiversity even as it responds to a changing climate. An integral component of freshwater resilience is aquatic connectivity. Large, diverse, and connected river networks in good ecological condition and with ample, unaltered water are expected to be more resilient because they provide many ways for freshwater species to adapt to changing conditions. TNC’s freshwater resilience analysis results are designed to assist practitioners working to protect or restore freshwater habitats. Available through the Resilient River Explorer (maps.tnc.org/resilientrivers), the two main products are: 1. Freshwater Resilience, a map and spatial database that scores every subwatershed in CONUS for climate resilience and provides users with the component values used to calculate resilience; and 2. the Freshwater Resilient and Connected Network (FRCN), which identifies a representative network of rivers, streams, and wetlands that, if conserved, could potentially sustain the freshwater diversity of CONUS under a changing climate. This presentation will highlight the key components of TNC’s freshwater resilience analysis, introduce the Resilient River Explorer (RRE) web tool and discuss its complementarity with the National Aquatic Barrier Inventory and Prioritization tool (https://aquaticbarriers.org/). While each web tool serves distinct purposes, the two can be used together to inform aquatic connectivity restoration activities that will increase the resilience of freshwater systems.
