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. Average attendance is around 28 students per offering, making these two of the best attended courses at the Hydrologic Engineering Center.

More information about the SRP is available online at www.nature.org/initiatives/ freshwater/partnerships

Created in 2003, the course 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).

A segment of the course also includes a segment dedicated to coastal restoration, which is an emerging aspect of the partnership between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and The Nature Conservancy. Through the course, restoration experts from the USACE Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) and the
Conservancy’s Global Marine Initiative co-present course materials and work to align ways that the agencies could partner. 

• Course Agenda
• Detailed Course Description

Beth Turner, a Corps regulator in Jacksonville District and member of the Water and the Watershed course, presents results of a workshop where students were asked to define ecosystem flows for the Green River in Utah.

Created in 2004, 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. 

• Course Agenda
• Detailed Course Description