Your Mission
Who uses the rivers in your watershed? How do you impact the rivers? What can you do to keep your rivers healthy? If this sounds a bit puzzling, don’t worry—you’ll soon put the pieces together.

We All Live Downstream
People need clean, healthy rivers for drinking water and other fresh-water needs. We use rivers for agriculture, industry, transportation, and recreation. Birds, fish, and wildlife rely on rivers for food and shelter.

People build structures to make maximum use of rivers: aqueducts to transport water; canals to improve transportation; dams to store water, control flooding, or provide hydroelectric power.

People also change rivers through pollution: fertilizer and pesticides run off from farms; fuel from gas stations leaks into groundwater; oil, grease, and debris wash down storm drains into streams; people throw trash in rivers. People clear forests, fill in wetlands, build roads, and erect buildings, and in doing so destroy wildlife habitat and change the pattern of runoff into rivers.

Doesn’t all that junk just float away and disappear? And if your river has a dam hundreds of miles away that doesn’t make any difference to you...does it? But the fact is, it does matter. We all live downstream!

Of Course You Can Make a River!
You’re going to create your own river system from puzzle pieces. Your river system will include things people need (a dam, factories) and things people enjoy (a playground, a campground). It will include natural areas that are good for wildlife. The good news is that there’s no wrong way to put your river together! This could be the easiest puzzle you’ve ever done...

There’s just one thing. Your river is part of a watershed, and everything in a watershed is connected—someone always lives downstream! So you need to put together a river that will benefit everyone—for a very long time. You need to ensure sustainable use of your river.

Before you begin, take a practice run by figuring out the “Delicate Balance” necessary to manage a river system. (Tennessee Valley Authority)

Piecing It All Together
You’ll make your river from puzzle pieces. (Download a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this file.) Cut the pieces apart. To assemble your river, move the puzzle pieces around freely. Only two pieces of your river must be positioned in certain places: the source and the mouth. When you’re building your river, look at the river system diagram for more clues. Where might a farm be located? A wetland? Do any pieces belong together (for example, the dam and the reservoir)? What belongs in an urban area? In a rural area?

To assemble your river, move the puzzle pieces around freely. When your team is satisfied with your river, tape the pieces together on construction paper, color the river, and give the river a title.

Pick one person from your team to explain to the class how your group decided where to put the different pieces.

As you can see from your river, people need rivers, and people change rivers. People also need to preserve rivers. Imagine a hot summer day when you want to cool your feet in a stream, but you can’t because it’s so dirty. Or having a picnic on a riverbank, but the river smells so bad that you don’t feel like eating. Practicing conservation decreases harm to the environment so that people and wildlife can safely use rivers. It’s up to everyone who lives downstream (and that’s each of us) to help preserve and restore rivers!

Take Action—Geography Action!
There are dozens of things that you and your family, friends, or classmates can do to protect rivers. (American Rivers)

Test your skills at the Watershed Game, and find more activities to do at home, at school, in your community, or on your computer. (National Geographic Society)

If you want to protect a river in your state, contact your congressman or senators via the National Wildlife Federation Web site. (National Wildlife Federation)

Whatever you decide to do, tell us about it! Fill out the Geography Action! survey, and learn what other students are doing for rivers!

“River Puzzle” activity adapted from Joan Stone, Teacher-Consultant.

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Photographs (left to right): Thomson River, Longreach, Queensland, Australia, by Roff Martin Smith; Wilberforce Falls, Hood River, Northwest Territories, Canada, by Todd Buchanan; Sierra Newt, California, copyright Corbis

© 2001 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.