Rivers-Streams+Conservation

Positive human impact

Humans have been volunteering to clean up rivers. There are millions of tons of trash being dumped in rivers every year. Volunteers have cleaned 5,000 miles of rivers, and picked up more than 2 million pounds of trash. It’s making people realize how much trash is actually in our rivers.

Negative human impact

One of the many negative human impacts in a river is damming. Damming is stopping the flow of a river to try to create a lake, or to control the levels of the water, but it may destroy ecosystems downstream. When a dam is made, the food control will stay the same but as months pass and fish start to eat the food, it disappears and Fish die of starvation. Dams can also obstruct the path of migratory fish and disrupt the life cycle of many different aquatic organisms. When they get rid of a dam they use a machine that rips out the dam restarting the flow of the river.



Problem that needs to be addressed by humans

A problem that needs to be addressed by humans is Invasive species. Invasive species is when species from far away are introduced into a new area and it can have devastating effects. The new species can spread into a habitat and take over the other species that is living there. One invasion of an outside species could change how the ecosystem functions, and reduce the biodiversity of the area. This problem needs to be fixed quickly because the outside species produce many offspring’s. More than $136 billion dollars are spent each year in the United States to manage invasive species. Finding and getting rid of invasive species before they become a big problems helps to reduce the money spent fixing the problem and the environmental damage done. People put chemicals in the water and moths that kill the invasive species but don’t completely harm the other aquatic organisms.



Problem that needs to be addressed by humans

The Ganges River is a sacred river to the Hindu religion. When people die, they will cremate the body and throw the ashes in the river. Sometimes, they won’t even do anything with the body. They just throw it in. The Hindus also use the river for bathing, but the river has dead bodies floating all around. Not much has been done to clean the river. Once, people tried a network of pipes that would bring the dead bodies to a pond, where bacteria would break them down. But, the pipes were run by electricity, and they ran out of power. Now there is a new plan, called the Ganga Action Plan. The first phase, which was basically the same thing as the pipes, failed, but people have hope for the second.

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