San Antonio College Library

Pictures and text describe many major rivers and the unique fish, animals and plants found in and around them.

"Rivers of North America represents the first comprehensive treatment of North America's rivers, from Southern Mexico to the Arctic. Written by professional biologists and river scientists, the text allows readers to compare systems throughout the continent. Each chapter focuses on a specific basin or region and details its physical, chemical, and biological aspects including human impacts, dam building, water diversions, and pollution. Within these...

In The Big Muddy, The First Long-Term Environmental History Of The Mississippi, Christopher Morris offers a brilliant tour across five centuries as he illuminates the interaction between people and the landscape, from early hunter-gatherer bands to present-day industrial and post-industrial society. Morris shows that when Hernando de Soto arrived at the lower Mississippi Valley, he found an incredibly vast wetland, forty thousand square miles of...

Environmental Flows describes the timing, quality, and quantity of water flows required to sustain freshwater and estuarian ecosystems and the human well-being and livelihoods that depend on them. It answers crucial questions about the flow of water within and between different kinds of ecosystems. What happens when the flow or the availability of water is curtailed or diverted, either naturally or by human activity? How will climate change alter...

The Colorado River is a crucial resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado's headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes readers on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks,...

"America has more than 250,000 rivers, coursing over more than 3 million miles, connecting the disparate regions of the United States. On a map, they can look like the veins, arteries, and capillaries of a continent-wide circulatory system, and in a way they are. Over the course of this nation's history, rivers have served as integral trade routes, borders, passageways, sewers, and sinks. Over the years, based on our shifting needs and values, we...