Oral Presentation Society for Freshwater Science 2026 Annual Meeting

Building resilience in large rivers of the northwest: Linking Science, Management, and Collaboration (136130)

Lisa Kunza 1 , Genny Hoyle 2 , Brandon Diller 3 , Kurt Chowanski 1 , Nathan Jensen 3 , Mark Elliston 3 , Campbell Olson 3 , Brooke Long-Fox 1 , Mehzabeen Mannan 1 , Aisling Hall 1 , Christopher Brooks 1 , Gregory Hoffman 4
  1. Center for Sustainable Solutions; Chemistry, Biology, and Health Sciences, South Dakota Mines, Rapid City, South Dakota, United States
  2. Environmental Department, Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, Bonners Ferry, Idaho, United States
  3. Fish and Wildlife Department, Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, Bonners Ferry, Idaho, United States
  4. US Army Corps of Engineers, Libby, MT, United States

Large, regulated rivers of the Northwest anchor biodiversity, Tribal lifeways, and regional economies. Yet hydropower, land-use change, and climate stressors have reshaped flow and thermal regimes, sediment and nutrient dynamics, floodplain connectivity, and food webs. Building resilience in these systems requires cross-disciplinary science and sustained collaboration among communities, Tribes, agencies, and universities. This opening presentation frames the special session by highlighting the monitoring, management, and restoration approaches needed to support resilience in large rivers. We invite practitioners and scientists to share research and programs that directly inform resilient watershed management, including work linking community-based monitoring and integrative indicators (e.g., whole-river metabolism, production, food-web quality, thermal refugia, eDNA/bioassessment, and sensor and remote networks) to management actions, including Indigenous-informed decisions. We begin the session with examples from the Kootenai River collaborative group to illustrate how integrative science and partnership-based approaches can connect ecosystem processes to restoration effectiveness in floodplains, side channels, and riparian areas, and to provide a common context for the talks that follow.