Training
The Sustainable Rivers Program offers training courses that emphasize connections between hydrology and ecology and outlines how those connections can be taken into account in water resource management. Two courses are offered as joint training opportunities from The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Each course is held once a year through the USACE Learning Center.
Hydrologic Analysis for Ecosystem Restoration
Hydrology for Restoration provides an understanding of the issues and policies in ecosystem restoration and details a variety of hydrologic methods used in restoration planning and design. The course has evolved to include a series of increasingly difficult topics and workshops, beginning with principles of hydrology, ecology, and statistics and advancing to time series analysis, hydrologic alteration, ecosystem flow definition, ecosystem functions modeling, river hydraulics and sedimentation. More than a third of the week is dedicated to software demonstrations and workshops where course participants gain experience using six different software tools, including the HEC Regime Prescription Tool (HEC-RPT).
Water and the Watershed
A student in Water and the Watershed presents student-defined environmental flows for the Green River, Utah (photo by John Hickey, USACE).
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Water and the Watershed is oriented toward science and the watershed policies of the Corps and other organizations. Its primary goal is to provide an understanding of the physical nature of water in the watershed and the conceptual, technical and institutional tools available for planning and management. A secondary goal is to promote use of a watershed perspective — a recognition that actions have impacts beyond any single project area and that, by involving others, the quality and vision of a project can be enhanced through the knowledge, creativity and perspectives that they bring to the table. The broad subject matter and large goals of this course have consistently attracted a mix of Corps professionals from planning, regulatory, engineering and water management.