What is your motivation to protect free-flowing rivers?
My motivation comes with the fascination of natural river dynamics. Give the heavy use, many river systems are faced with high and multiple anthropogenic pressures and most industrial nations have lost their wild and natural rivers. This leads to the depressing fact that many people even do not know how natural rivers look like with their fascinating wild and living dynamics. This needs to be changed, especially in terms of achieving a sustainable compromise between river use and their conservation.
Why should we defend these wild rivers?
Only free-flowing rivers create favourable conditions for the survival and dispersal of aquatic organisms, enable sediment flow, balance thermal and flooding regimes, but also enable dynamic ecosystem. Human made in-river impoundments alter the main characteristics of lotic ecosystems, cause geophysical and hydro-morphological changes. Barriers have therefore a direct impact on the aquatic living species, biological interactions and ecological processes both upstream and downstream. Only wild and free flowing river can benefits aquatic life, people and economy.