So glad that you investigated this issue! PISS is crappy, and it needs to be called out.

Expanding river-specific protections, such as new federal and state Wild and Scenic Rivers and Outstanding Resource Waters, would ensure effective, durable protection measures tailored to rivers.

Individual states can promote river protection through new or strengthened riparian buffer legislation, administrative rules, or agricultural/forestry best practices. Protecting rivers flowing through private lands, such as those offered by easements or land trust acquisitions/agreements, is key.

Federal public lands have an outsized role in protecting rivers nationwide, and multiple-use lands provide a major opportunity to scale protections; weakening or eliminating existing environmental policy mechanisms would undermine these safeguards.

Protection often does not coincide with other conservation objectives, where only a small fraction of watersheds with high biodiversity, habitat intactness and importance to drinking water supply are adequately protected.

Protection is overwhelmingly driven by land-based mechanisms, which are often spatially misaligned with hotspots of freshwater biodiversity and may inadequately safeguard rivers from upstream threats. Protection is also uneven across river types (intermittent rivers less protected) and geographies.

America’s rivers are alarmingly under protected. Just over one-tenth (12%) of rivers in the contiguous United States and less than one-fifth (19%) nationwide are currently protected at a level deemed viable, while two-thirds remain entirely unprotected under the mechanisms assessed in this study.

A huge congrats Tim!

I enjoyed your talk Miguel. It was early for me (6:30 am), but it was well worth it!

Nah ... I end up buying caps on eBay. I mostly use uncrimped caps (i.e., before they are used).

Thanks Corey!

Interesting! I'm on my reading list for the week.

Absolutely ... and very much our message! Thanks for your comment.

Funding: CESAB programme of @frbiodiv.bsky.social. Great list of co-authors and fun working group! @uwsafs.bsky.social @uwfreshwater.bsky.social @profchrisharrod.bsky.social @profchrisharrod.bsky.social

Importantly, we continue to believe that morphological traits hold VALUE in depicting habitat use, ecological diversity & offering insight into fish movement! But our results do raise concerns of whether such traits are ‘functional’ in that they are a reasonable proxy of a species' trophic ecology.