Rivers of North America

Michael Delong is a Professor of Biology and Director of the Large River Studies Center at Winona State University, Winona, Minnesota USA. Delong has studied rivers for over 30 years, with a focus on community and ecosystem ecology and has engaged in research in a number of rivers in the U.S. as well as rivers in Australia. A primary focus of his research has been on food web ecology, with both applied and basic implications. As director of the LRSC, Delong engaged over 160 undergraduate students in research of aquatic systems. Delong has published 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and contributed to three books on river science. Tim Jardine is an Associate Professor in the Toxicology Centre and the School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Rivers Institute and an Adjunct Research Fellow of the Australian Rivers Institute. His research focuses on energy and contaminant cycling in aquatic ecosystems, the development of ecological tracers to study food webs, and biomonitoring of river health. His past research has taken him to northern Australia, Singapore and the central Amazon, and he currently leads community engaged, interdisciplinary research in a complex social-ecological system, the Saskatchewan River Delta in central Canada. Arthur C. Benke has been Professor of Biology at the University of Alabama from 1984 to 2012 and has been Professor Emeritus since then. Before that he was a faculty member of the Georgia Institute of Technology for 13 years. He has published widely in scientific journals and books, primarily on the ecology of invertebrates in rivers, streams and wetlands, and was the senior editor for Rivers of North America (2005) and Field Guide to Rivers of North America (2010). He has served on the editorial boards of Ecology, Freshwater Biology, the Journal of the North American Benthological Society (J-NABS), and is past president of NABS. He received his B.S. in Biological Sciences from Cornell University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Zoology/Ecology from the University of Georgia. He received the Award of Excellence from the Society for Freshwater Science (SFS) in 2012 and became an inaugural Fellow of SFS in 2017. Colbert E. Cushing was a Senior Research Scientist with the Battelle-Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Richland, Washington, until semi-retiring in 1996. He was an Adjunct Professor at Washington State University-Tri Cities, and held an Affiliate Faculty appointment at Colorado State University. He was one of the scientists instrumental in the formulation and testing of the River Continuum Concept. He has published widely in scientific journals and books, was the lead editor of River and Stream Ecosystems, and co-authored Streams: Their Ecology and Life. He served on the editorial boards for the journals Ecology and Journal of the North American Benthological Society (NABS) and was past president of NABS. He was co-editor for the first edition of Rivers of North America and Field Guide to Rivers of North America (2010) and passed away before the completion of the second edition.