The Clean Water Act (CWA) requires that wetlands be protected from degradation because of their important ecological functions including maintenance of high water quality and provision of fish and wildlife habitat. However, this protection generally does not encompass riparian areasâ€"the lands bordering rivers and lakesâ€"even though they often provide the same functions as wetlands. Growing recognition of the similarities in wetland and riparian area functioning and the differences in their legal protection led the NRC in 1999 to undertake a study of riparian areas, which has culminated in Riparian Areas: Functioning and Strategies for Management. The report is intended to heighten awareness of riparian areas commensurate with their ecological and societal values. The primary conclusion is that, because riparian areas perform a disproportionate number of biological and physical functions on a unit area basis, restoration of riparian functions along America's waterbodies should be a national goal.

The development of water and other natural resources in the Upper Colorado River Basin will continue to have an impact on the ecology of this unique ecosystem. Numerous water-development projects have been completed on the river, others are in progress, and still others are contemplated, to provide water necessary for municipalities, irrigated agriculture, and energy production. Although much information is already available on this river, it is widely scattered in the published literature and unpublished reports of various state and federal agencies. This annotated bibliography contains 1,109 published or readily available unpublished references that should be useful in decisions regarding effective management of the Upper Colorado River Basin. Selected key words were assigned to all references and indexed for ease of locating references on particular subjects.

This annotated bibliography contains 1,905 citations from professional journals, symposia, workshops, proceedings, technical reports, and other sources. The intent of this compilation was to: (1) assemble, to the extent possible, all available and accessible publications relating to riparian management within a single source or document; (2) provide managers, field biologists, researchers, and others, a point of access for locating scientific literature relevent to their specific interest; and (3) provide, under one cover, a comprehensive collection of annotated publications that could dessiminate basic information relative to the status of our knowledge.