Documenting A Place
The Amur watershed is one of the last in the world with a “clean slate” in terms of damming and diversions. It is a precious example of what a geographically unaltered river looks and acts like. At the rate we are damming rivers not a single river of this magnitude will likely be left unaltered for the next generation and they will have no baseline by which to understand free-flowing rivers.
We are honored to help document this incredible place while it remains undammed and bring back our findings to inform river management in our own communities and across the globe. Ecological documentation will include cataloging species diversity and collecting water quality measurements across the entire watershed. We are particularly interested in changes at major tributaries.
Amur River Atlas
With all of the images, stories and data gathered we are creating a fully interactive web-based Atlas where any mouse click along the length of a Watershed map will take the user to that area. It will provide photos, video, interviews, sights and sounds, and ecological data collected in that portion of the watershed.
The Atlas will be used as a tool for environmental education and conservation. We hope to get it into as many homes and classrooms as possible. It is also a pilot project that may be reproduced on other important global rivers.
Why It Matters
We believe one of the best ways to conserve wild places is to help people connect with them. Visual media and storytelling are powerful tools in this regard. But they must be accessible to a broad audience to have a great effect. This is the first time anyone has attempted to catalogue this much information about such a massive watershed in a format interesting and available to anyone in the world with internet access.
This Atlas has the potential to help transform the way we think about healthy rivers and serve as a new baseline for the management of our global watersheds. Our goal is to create powerful and educational tool for the conservation of international rivers.
