Inter-Fluve

08/24/2024

Today is National Hydropower Day! At first glance, it might seem unusual for a river restoration company to celebrate our hydropower clients, but times are changing. Stanford University’s Uncommon Dialogue has led the way for collaboration between the hydropower industry and environmental groups by articulating their common goals for a clean energy future while maintaining healthy rivers. Inter-Fluve is actively engaged in working groups as part of the Uncommon Dialogue process—catch us at NHA’s Clean Currents Conference in Portland, OR in October! Here are some photos of projects we’ve worked on with our hydropower clients from Maine to Oregon.

07/19/2024

You are invited! Our Annual Celebration will be held October 17 at the Jupiter NEXT Hotel in Portland. Join us to enjoy delicious cuisine from Javelina, wine from Cooper Mountain Vineyards, Hopworks Brewery beer, honoring our Steward of the Year, and fun experiences you can win. You can buy your tickets today at our early bird price! https://www.estuarypartnership.org/celebration24

Thanks to our sponsors: CONSOR Engineers, Inter-Fluve, Wolf Water Resources, MacKay Sposito, Port of Portland, and Robertson Fick Engineering, PC!

We are still seeking sponsorships and donations to help make the event a success - reach out to Erinne at [email protected] if you have something to offer!

12/11/2023

10/12/2023

06/05/2023

At Inter-Fluve, we believe in continuous learning and collaboration. We value our partnerships with academic institutions and regularly invite experts in aquatic ecosystem restoration to come share their research with our team. Recently, we had the pleasure of hosting two speakers: Dr. Ed Hale, an Assistant Professor from the University of Delaware, and Rachel Roday, a Master's student from Dr. Hale's lab. They presented their research on diadromous fish behavior in tributaries impacted by fish passage barriers in northern Delaware. This sort of research enhances our understanding of fish passage and enables us to better support our coastal partners.

05/23/2023

Happy World Turtle Day! As an aquatic ecosystem restoration firm, we always appreciate the chance to work with our cold-blooded clients. Here are some turtle sightings from our fieldwork adventures in Oklahoma, Hawaii, Minnesota, and Idaho. 🐢

05/08/2023

At Inter-Fluve, annual meetings tend to involve hanging out on the roof and wearing silly costumes.

03/14/2023

03/07/2023

Happy International Geomorphology Week! We're excited to celebrate the amazing work of our talented geomorphologists across the country. From studying river channels and coastal processes to exploring the impacts of human activities on landscapes, our team is dedicated to understanding how natural systems function and the implications for restoration ecology. Check out these stunning photos captured by our geomorphologists!

02/03/2023

Today is World Wetlands Day. Instead of talking about how important and beautiful wetlands are, we want to ask you a question. This picture shows a scene that is common in many agricultural areas. A wetland was drained into a ditch, and over time the ditch has started to look and act like a stream. Unlike our other stream restoration projects, there likely was not a channel there in the first place. So, what does it mean to "restore" this area? Does it mean bringing back the wetland and losing the stream? Or does it mean improving instream and riparian habitat as if the stream has always been there?

01/13/2023

Here’s a question that we get asked pretty frequently: “Why don’t you just let nature take its course?”

While nature can overcome just about any obstacle placed in front of it, that takes time. So, we use the best science available to move systems towards more sustainable and robust conditions to save species that need those conditions as soon as possible. This can be tricky, because when it comes to aquatic ecosystems, the line between “natural” and “artificial” is blurry. Any surface water that you see is almost always much less “natural” than it seems. Even a scene like this is heavily managed. Following urban growth, developers drained wetlands, built dams, and paved over the ground. These actions increased and exacerbated flooding. In response, a watershed management organization was formed, and a dam was built upstream to control the flow. This story applies to countless streams and rivers across the world, and it has for a very long time.

Historically, in the USA, “managing water resources” has meant ditching, damming, and draining surface water. Over time, a lot of these ditches, dams, and impoundments started to take on the appearance of “natural” streams, waterfalls, and lakes. These systems typically fail to support the full range of ecosystem services that evolved in those locations.

Luckily, as we better understand these systems, there has been a paradigm shift. Instead of confining and diverting streams and rivers, we are seeing riverside communities undertake projects to expand and diversify habitat, improve surface water quality, and support more ecologically appropriate recreational opportunities in their waterways. These projects attempt to restore ecological conditions that, in some cases, have been absent for hundreds of years. This is the sort of work that we support every day.

Returning to the original question: why don’t we just let nature take its course? Emma Maris, in her book Rambunctious Garden, has a possible answer: “We’ve forever altered the Earth, and so now we cannot abandon it to a random fate. It is our duty to manage it."