Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program:
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

The purpose of this NSF Research Coordination Network (RCN) is to organize a series of expert workgroups to synthesize the growing body of research on intermittent river hydrology and ecology. Intermittent rivers, those that cease to flow each year make up more than half of the Earth’s river channels. Yet, intermittent rivers are often overlooked or excluded from water management plans due to uncertainty about their hydrologic and ecological importance. Workgroups formed by this RCN will create products that explain how intermittent river hydrologic and ecologic systems work, including characterization of flow-regimes, synthesis of biodiversity and ecosystem datasets, and integrated conceptual and process-based statistical ecohydrology models. This research will improve the management of intermittent rivers by enhancing communication and networking among academic researchers and nonacademic stakeholders and providing open access datasets, methods, and materials to the broader scientific community. This RCN award is funded by the National Science Foundation to Daniel Allen at Pennsylvania State University. The RCN is made up of primarily academic and federal scientists in the United States, Europe, and Australia.