From the shortest to longest and biggest to smallest, this ecosystem investigation uses varying degrees of comparison to take a closer look at the relationships of river flora, fauna, and landforms.

Rivers and lakes are rich habitats filled with all the elements their inhabitants need for survival. Peel back a corner of these amazing ecosystems to discover the incredible organisms that function within them and around them, from microorganisms and plants to fish and the mammals that feed on them.

Examines why rivers and streams important to life on Earth, including the relationships among rivers, humans, aquatic animals, and the rest of natural world.

Abbie Gascho Landis brings readers to a hotbed of mussel diversity, the American Southeast, to seek mussels where they eat, procreate, and, too often, perish. Accompanied often by her husband, a mussel scientist, and her young children, she learned to see mussels on the creekbed, to tell a spectaclecase from a pigtoe, and to worry what vanishing mussels--70 percent of North American species are imperiled--will mean for humans and wildlife alike. Landis...

"In Southern Rivers: Restoring America's Freshwater Biodiversity, R. Scot Duncan explores the environmental history and future of the rivers of the southeastern United States. These river systems are the epicenter of North American freshwater biodiversity and the top global hotspot for several aquatic taxa including mussels, turtles, snails, crayfish, and temperate zone fish; these rivers also play a prominent role in the region's history, culture,...

"Short poems for children about rivers and the life found along them"-- Provided by publisher.

"What if rivers could talk and tell their stories? What would they tell us? In What Rivers Know, artist Basia Irland insinuates herself as the voice of major waterways as they struggle to navigate their changing relationships with humans and climate change. By hearing what the rivers have to say, Irland asserts we can attune ourselves to the "braided fusion of energies" in our natural world, better preparing us to meet the challenges posed by climate...

"Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they can teem (usually) with life; they may die a quasi-natural death; they are frequently maimed and even murdered. It is the annual flood pulse-the brief time when the river occupies the floodplain-that gives a river its vitality, but it is human engineering that kills it, suppressing...