About Us

About the Natural Channels Initiative

The Natural Channels Initiative (NCI) is a group of Canadian water resources professionals dedicated to the restoration and sustainable management of rivers and streams using natural channel design principles. The core principle of the Natural Channel Initiative is to manage our watercourses to be naturally functional, dynamically stable, healthy, productive, sustainable, to deal with the fundamental root cause of issues, and to work with the natural processes taking place within our river systems.

Since the 1990s, one of the main outputs from the NCI is the hosting of conferences to advance natural channel restoration through knowledge sharing, workshops, training, and networking.

What to Expect at the Natural Channels Conference

The First Natural Channel Systems conference was held in Niagara Falls in 1994. Since then, NCI has hosted seven conferences across Southern Ontario to bring together practitioners across various industries, public agencies, academia, and other organizations that are passionate about watercourse management, and to share knowledge and lessons learned on topics such as:

Restoring the geomorphic stability of streams
Enhancing aquatic and riparian ecosystems
Developing sustainable, self-maintaining channel systems
Integrating multidisciplinary knowledge into watercourse management
Machine learning and modelling in fluvial geomorphology
Overcoming challenges during design, implementation and post-construction phases
Building resilient watersheds as natural infrastructure for climate change adaptation