Disappearing Rivers of the Western United States

In the western United States, widespread development has transformed much of the landscape, altering rivers and their ability to sustain services essential to both the region’s ecology and economy. Rivers continue to face a variety of stressors, and so we believe there is an urgent need to evaluate and document the status of rivers across the American West. The Disappearing Rivers assessment will enrich dialogue around the opportunities for river conservation and restoration by providing a consistent and reliable accounting of the current status of stressors to flowing waters in the western United States.

Disappearing Rivers is the culmination of an analysis by Conservation Science Partners, in association with the Center for American Progress, to investigate how human development has altered rivers in the eleven western states. The objective of Disappearing Rivers is to quantify the degree to which human activities have altered rivers in the western US. We separated this objective into two primary components: flow alteration and floodplain alteration. The Disappearing Rivers gallery contains river and stream flowlines data with associated flow and floodplain alteration attributes.

Data downloads can be requested at the Disappearing Rivers Data Users Group page here: https://databasin.org/groups/060509c8892449798b6fbc42cdd851ca