ABSTRACT
River management is a hard term to define. This arises because the practice of managing rivers has evolved over time to incorporate different disciplines and user groups. Fundamentally, river management involves the manipulation of channel flows and the physical characteristics of a channel in order to meet human needs and those of the other biotic communities. River management is an ongoing activity as rivers tend to ‘undo’ the modifications made to them by people. The management of rivers has a long history and as such has played an important part in the development of cultural responses to rivers. Up to 1950 a few limited straightening schemes had been attempted by individual landowners for the purposes of agricultural land drainage. In the United States, stakeholder groups have been increasingly prompting resource managers to consider dam removal as a policy option and as a tool for watershed management.
