Arjan is passionate about people and nature. He believes in a future where people and nature can exist in harmony.

He started his career studying business administration and working for the shipping multinational P&O Nedlloyd. After years of working as an expat he followed his heart for nature and changed course by completing a Master’s in Environmental Management. He worked on nature conservation and development issues, ranging from advocacy, campaigning, and managing field projects. He moved on to become Head of the freshwater programme and delta advisor at WWF in Netherlands, with a focus on restoring and protecting estuaries worldwide. He started a programme in the Netherlands, restoring natural dynamics in the delta and bringing back the sturgeon in the Netherlands.

He moved on become director of the ‘Waddenvereniging’, a Dutch NGO protecting the UNESCO World Heritage Wadden Sea, creating the innovative Fish Migration River project on the lower Rhine. The project made him so enthusiastic on the issue of opening rivers that he moved on to become the Director of World Fish Migration Foundation until 2020.

Arjan is the Chair of the Supervisory Board for the programme. He also currently works on projects to develop new nature-based solutions and is Chair of the Dutch National Park of Schiermonnikoog.

Bart Fokkens worked for 40 years with the Ministry for Water Management in the Netherlands in various positions in the field of Land, Water and Wetland Management, often participating in international cooperation programs. These included twinning projects between the deltas of the Rhine, Danube, Volga and Pechora and capacity development and training under the framework of the Ramsar Convention.

Between 2002 and 2010 he was president of the Dutch National Union of Provincial Nature Conservation Organisations. He is the co-founder (1999) and for ten years was the chair of the European Centre for River Restoration (ECRR) a Pan – European network of national river restoration centres and other members bound by their common mission to promote and enhance ecological river restoration. He remains an associated expert with the ECRR and Wetlands International and a member of the Oversight and Selection Panel of the Endangered Landscape Program of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI).

After finalizing her master’s in business economics Caroline started her career in 1991 at Ernst & Young where she worked as an auditor and completed her postgraduate CPA. Caroline then moved to Reed Elsevier (now RELX), in Amsterdam and London where she held several positions – most recently the position of Chief Financial Officer of the Scientific Division. From 2008 she worked at the World Wildlife Fund in Zeist, successively as CFO and COO. In 2015 Caroline joined the internal secretariat of WWF in Geneva. Now Caroline is vice-president of NWO, the Dutch Research Council. Besides her role at NWO, Caroline is a supervisory Board Member of Teylers museum and a Board member of Stichting Albron.

Jack is passionate about the restoration of degraded landscapes and organising and implementing projects that bring back nature. He is keen to turn planning and ideas into action by making conservation and restoration happen. This approach has informed his career of over 20 years, working for government and conservation NGOs.

Jack began his career in 2001, working for the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the field of Sustainable Agriculture. In 2005, he joined Fauna & Flora International’s corporate partnerships team, working with large and small businesses to enable them to better understand, manage and protect biodiversity. In 2008, he moved on to work with Royal Society for Protection of Birds to manage several projects in Eastern Europe and Eurasia to encourage and support small businesses to conserve and restore nature. Between 2010 – 2014, he managed two large wetland restoration projects in Belarus and Ukraine which sought to re-wet over 20,000 ha of degraded peatland to restore biodiversity and mitigate climate change.

In 2015, Jack played a leading role with Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) and its nine partners to set up and operate the David Attenborough Building in Cambridge, one of the largest conservation hubs in the world. He continued his interests in restoration by helping to advise CCI on the creation of the Arcadia funded Endangered Landscapes Programme. Between 2017 – 2021, Jack moved on to work with Arcadia to help manage their programme of environmental grants. During this time, he began exploring the potential for creating a new European dam removal programme, which led to the creation of the Open Rivers Programme in October 2021.

Jack is a Geography graduate from Kings College London, specialising in Political Ecology.

Gwen is a restoration practitioner with over a decade of experience in ecological restoration program administration and grant management. Gwen is passionate about free-flowing rivers, the restoration of function over form, and breaking down barriers for others to join the dam removal movement. She believes in the importance of building strong relationships with interdisciplinary teams to implement creative solutions. Witnessing the systemic change that occurs when a barrier is removed from a river is what propelled her into a career in environmental resource engineering and ecological restoration – she’s been hooked ever since.

Starting in 2010, Gwen oversaw all ecological restoration design, implementation, and monitoring activities for Save the Sound, a regional non-profit in the northeast USA. Gwen became Save the Sound’s first Director of Ecological Restoration, managing river restoration, green infrastructure, watershed planning and coastal resilience under one department, expanding it from a small pass-through grant program to an interdisciplinary staff of eight. She provided program, financial and administrative support for federal, regional, and private grants undertaken by the organization including grant development, scoping, contract negotiations, budgeting, due diligence, and reporting. Since 2010, the program has restored over 130 ha of tidal marsh and opened 100 km to fish passage.

Prior to 2010, Gwen was employed as an environmental engineering consultant in the northeast USA working on environmental remediation and restoration design projects. Gwen holds a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Resource Engineering from the ABET-EAC accredited State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry with post-graduate studies at Rutgers and the University of Massachusetts.

Kara is an environmental activist and urban researcher based in Berlin. Her advocacy explores the entanglement between biodiversity, ecological restoration, gender and social justice.

Before joining the Open Rivers Programme, she worked with RiverWatch to coordinate the Scientists for Balkan Rivers Network and the Vjosa National Park Now global actions as part of the Save the Blue Heart of Europe Campaign. With the River Collective NGO, Kara organised multidisciplinary projects bringing researchers, students, activists, communities and experts together for the protection of free flowing rivers across Europe.

She graduated from the University of New South Wales in Sydney with a bachelor in Landscape Architecture and later completed a masters of Urban Management at the Technical University of Berlin.

Kara also works with the ‘Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies’ at the Humboldt University and teaches at the ‘Rachel Carson Centre’ at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with the Visionary Ecologies Lab.

Christiane is passionate about leading business transformation projects. She has a proven track record in introducing innovative initiatives and steered transformations that increased operational efficiency and strengthened stakeholder connections across EMEA, North and Latin America working for global consulting businesses, non-profits, universities, and startups.

Since 2018, Christiane has had her own operations consulting business, focusing on setting up and maintaining clear and easy systems to manage and navigate. Christiane is known for her entrepreneurial mindset and thinking ‘outside the box’ with the ability to see the big picture and bring structure to define processes, identify goals and achieve results.

In addition to this role, Christiane works as Planning and Operations Manager at an international not-for-profit association, Women in Aerospace Europe. She has successfully steered transformations that increased operational efficiency over the past three years advocating commitment to aerospace programs along with her colleagues.

Christiane holds a bachelor’s degree in finance and administration from the Tec Milenio in Mexico, a technical degree in Solar Energy from Maurer Institute in Spain and a diploma in Mindfulness, Emotional Management and Positive Psychology from the European Institute of Positive Psychology (IEPP). Christiane was also Mountain Bike Champion (Mexico 2001) and 4th in the Mountain Bike World Cup (Napa Valley, California 2002).

Roxanne has made it her personal mission to educate as much of the global community as she can on the necessity to restore and protect biodiversity hotspots like rivers. Over the last several years she has worked for and continues to engage with organisations that focus on saving Europe’s rivers.

In 2021, Roxanne started her own communications consulting business, focusing on freshwater restoration and conservation in Europe and North America. Through the amazing opportunities brought on by the organisations she works with, she has the great opportunity to play a part in trying to make the Vjosa River in Albania the first Wild River National Park in Europe. She is working alongside outstanding colleagues who are lobbying to change EU legislation to ban future hydropower and forest biomass. Now she is also part of this passionate team that is offering grants to remove barriers in rivers to restore river health and biodiversity in Europe.

Before becoming a consultant, Roxanne was the communications manager for the World Fish Migration Foundation in the Netherlands where she led the communications work for the AMBER Horizon 2020 project, Dam Removal Europe, and World Fish Migration Day, simultaneously.  Prior to her career in environmental communications, she interned for the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary in California in the Natural Resource Protection department and as an educator at the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher.

Roxanne holds an honours programme bachelor’s degree in marine biology from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and an MSc in environmental science and management with a focus on environmental communication and media from the University of California Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management.

Dam Removal Europe
The Dam Removal Europe coalition was founded in 2015 to build a movement of proud river practitioners and enable them to remove dams and restore rivers. The DRE partners provide resources and tools for dam removal, share knowledge and best practice showcases, provide advocacy and lobbying to catalyse funding, organise international seminars for river restoration professionals, and execute awareness campaigns to normalise dam removal as a tool to restore rivers. DRE is a close cooperation among seven organizations: World Wildlife Fund, The Rivers Trust, The Nature Conservancy, European Rivers Network, Rewilding Europe, Wetlands International and the World Fish Migration Foundation (coordinator).

Herman Wanningen
Herman is the founder and director of the World Fish Migration Foundation. He is an ecologist and entrepreneur specializing in scaling up ideas that support river restoration. He is recognized internationally for his work promoting free-flowing rivers and migratory fish by raising global awareness through the ‘World Fish Migration Day’. He is one of the initiators behind the successful Dam Removal Europe coalition. He was recently awarded a special fellowship program at the Mulago Foundation, USA, to help scale up dam removal in Europe.

Dam Removal Europe
The Dam Removal Europe coalition was founded in 2015 to build a movement of proud river practitioners and enable them to remove dams and restore rivers. The DRE partners provide resources and tools for dam removal, share knowledge and best practice showcases, provide advocacy and lobbying to catalyse funding, organise international seminars for river restoration professionals, and execute awareness campaigns to normalise dam removal as a tool to restore rivers. DRE is a close cooperation among seven organizations: World Wildlife Fund, The Rivers Trust, The Nature Conservancy, European Rivers Network, Rewilding Europe, Wetlands International and the World Fish Migration Foundation (coordinator).

Merijn Hougee
As senior advisor freshwater at WWF Netherlands, Merijn works to bring back life to Europe’s rivers. His key focus areas are free-flowing rivers and nature-based solutions for freshwater management. Merijn holds a bachelor’s degree in International Land and Water Management and an MSc in Marine Governance. He has worked as program manager and director for several environmental NGOs in Europe and is (co)founder of various initiatives such as the Beach Clean-up Tour, the Clean River program for plastic-free rivers and the Clean Shipping Index.

European Center for River Restoration
The ECRR, founded in 1999, is an independent association, free to voice opinions, irrespective of the interests of its members. This makes ECRR: “The network for best practice river restoration in greater Europe” through:

• A mission to encourage and support ecological river restoration throughout greater Europe, through a European network consisting of organisations, institutions, and individual subscribers.
• Connecting people and organizations working on river restoration. The network consists of about 2000 contacts, is represented in 12 European countries and cooperates with several key partners.
• Supporting the development of best practices of river restoration and disseminating information on ecological river restoration, for instance via the RiverWiki Platform for case studies from all over Europe.

Martin Janes
Martin is the director of the UK River Restoration Centre (RRC). He has 25 years of experience in river restoration and best practice river management including scoping, planning, coordinating, delivering and assessing restoration projects throughout the UK. He is also the RRC’s policy/strategy lead on steering and programme groups advising government agencies. Moreover, Martin is a long-term promoter of Europe-wide sharing of best practices and invited speaker for international presentations and discussions on UK and EU river restoration policy and delivery to various environment ministries (Norway 2021, Israel 2020, France 2018, EC Environment & Climate Committee, 2016, S. Korea 2014, etc).

Global Water Partnership
GWP’s vision is for a water secure world. Their mission is to advance governance and management of water resources for sustainable and equitable development. Their unique contribution is to mobilise action on the global water crisis through a unique combination of social capital, shared values, credibility within the global water community, bottom-up orientation, and expertise. A network of networks, they ensure the ‘voices of water’ can influence local, national, regional, and global development priorities. GWP is committed to their role as a neutral convener and respected for their focus on inclusiveness and sustainability.

Konstantin Ivanov
Konstantin Ivanov is the Regional Coordinator of Global Water Partnership Central and Eastern Europe. He has extensive experience in nature conservation, including freshwater restoration and climate change adaptation projects, as well as managerial, fundraising, advocacy, and campaigning work. He has also executed successful projects of regional importance in cooperation with the private sector. For example, a major project to restore vital wetlands along the River Danube and its tributaries in Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria has created a regional movement to protect these important habitats.

MERLIN Project
The EU-funded MERLIN project demonstrates best practices for freshwater restoration, with a specific focus on dam removal and floodplain reconnection at streams and rivers. Bringing together 44 partners from across Europe, including universities, research institutes and nature conservation organisations, as well as stakeholders for businesses, governments and municipalities, the project draws on successful freshwater restoration projects across Europe transforming them into beacons of innovation. Through collaborations with local communities and key economies, MERLIN co-develops win-win solutions spearheading systemic economic, social and environmental change.

Sebastian Birk
Sebastian is a senior scientist and lecturer at the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). His research covers environmental condition and human impact assessment, multiple stressors in aquatic systems, ecosystem services, restoration ecology and environmental policy implementation. For about 20 years his work contributes to the ecological assessment of European freshwaters, including the various facets of implementing the European Water Framework Directive. Sebastian coordinated the EU-funded research project MARS, which analyzed multiple stressors acting on Europe’s freshwaters. As the science manager for freshwaters at the European Topic Centre (commissioned by the European Environment Agency), he is involved in Europe’s science-policy discussions. Currently, he coordinates the EU-funded project MERLIN, mainstreaming freshwater restoration across Europe.

Swansea University
Established in 1920, Swansea University is a Higher Education and Research Institution in Wales that was ranked in the UK’s top 20 Universities for Graduate Prospects and 5-star in the University QS system for teaching quality. The Biosciences department at Swansea was ranked 7th in the UK and top in Wales in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework and had over 93% of its research outputs classified as world-leading or internationally excellent. Swansea University led the AMBER Project (Adaptive Management of European Rivers) and its FishBEE group has championed the dam removal movement since 2008.

Carlos Garcia de Leaniz
Carlos is Professor of Aquatic BioSciences and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Aquatic Research (CSAR) at Swansea University (UK). He obtained a BSc in Marine Biology at the University of Victoria (BC, Canada) and a PhD (Zoology) at the University of Aberdeen (UK), followed by post-doctoral research at the University of Glasgow and ZSL London. He led the Horizon 2020 AMBER project and is the current lead for the project ‘Reconnecting the Salmon Rivers of Wales’ funded by NNF. His expertise is mostly on fish ecology and conservation. He has authored 80+ scientific publications and was awarded the 2014 ‘Ríos con Vida’ prize for his work on the conservation of Atlantic salmon and named “River Restoration hero” in the 2008 World’s River Review by International Rivers.

Benoît has nearly 20 years of experience in integrated river basin management. Fascinated by rivers, he began his career in the UK in 2002, with the Dutch consultancy Royal Haskoning, in the coastal and rivers division. For the last 10 years, he has been working for the Rhône Mediterranean and Corsica water agency as an expert in hydromorphology and river restoration.

He is the author or co-author of several technical guides, including a guide on space for river and on the management of braided rivers. The water agency plays a key role in enabling river restoration and it is estimated that it has contributed to remove over 800 weirs or dams on the Rhône Mediterranean basin. Benoît is a contributor to the ECRR technical newsletter and is a member of the European community of practice on river restoration. He loves spending time hiking with his family, reading, gardening, beekeeping, birdwatching, stargazing and photography. He also works as a volunteer with the local authorities of his village to protect, promote and restore local biodiversity.

Britta-Antje Behm has been Head of the Unit “International Agreements Rhine and Danube, Water Framework Directive, Support Schemes” at the Ministry of the Environment Climate Protection and the Energy Sector in Baden-Württemberg since May 2011. Her focus lies on the preparation and implementation of the River Basin Management Plans and the Programmes of Measures for the region as well as on the financial support of communities in the field of water policy. The fields of activity also include ecological aspects of hydropower.

From 1994 she worked in different departments of the Ministry, e. g. Emission Protection, European Affairs and Chemical Policy. She started her professional career in the Regional Authority. Mrs Behm studied law at Tübingen, Germany, and finished her Second State Examination in Stuttgart, Germany.

Karolina Gurjazkaitė is an environmental expert and advocate with an interdisciplinary background of social and environmental sciences. She has been working for four years on freshwater policy, aiming for dam removals to be included in the Lithuanian laws and strategic plans. In 2020, through a crowdfunding campaign, Karolina initiated, led, and oversaw the first ever dam removal project in Lithuania to encourage more river restoration projects. Since 2018, she has been hosting seminars and bringing experts together to enable dam removals and open rivers in Lithuania.

Laura is a practising fisheries and water resource manager, specializing in ecological restoration consulting for aquatic systems. Her expertise and passion, centre on the restoration of rivers through the reestablishment of natural functions and aquatic connectivity. She is considered one of the leading experts in United States on barrier removal and alternative fish passage techniques, regularly lecturing, instructing, and publishing on these topics, including assisting with the instruction of courses for the University of Wisconsin and Yale University. In addition to engineering and river science, her work has emphasized reconnecting communities to rivers, and the socio-economic complexities relating to the balance between natural resource management and healthy river systems.

Laura has been involved in hundreds of river restoration, barrier removal, and fish passage projects throughout the U.S.; working on all aspects of the projects from inception through design and construction, both as a licensed professional engineer designing and managing the projects and as a non-profit project partner when she was the Chief Engineer of American Rivers.

Laura received her bachelor’s in Civil Engineering from University of Vermont, her Master of Environmental Management from Yale University, and has conducted two years of post-graduate work at the University of Southampton, focusing on international issues relating to the removal of dams and the restoration of aquatic connectivity. Laura integrates both engineering and a deep understanding of river science into her restoration work.

Maja works as a Legal Expert (Juriste) at international environmental law NGO ClientEarth, in Brussels. As a member of the Wildlife and Habitats team, she focuses on hydro-energy projects and their impacts on rivers, species, and habitats, making sure they comply with the EU and international environmental laws. Before joining ClientEarth, Maja worked as a paralegal for an international law firm in Glasgow, after interning for the UNCITRAL Secretariat in Vienna and working for a private law firm in Bosnia and Herzegovina after her studies. Maja acquired her law degree in 2014 from the Faculty of Law, University of Banja Luka (Bosnia and Herzegovina), and in 2016, she graduated with distinction from the University of Strathclyde, where she obtained her LLM degree in International Economic Law.

Olle Calles currently holds the position of Professor in Aquatic Ecology, River Ecology, and management research group (RivEM), at Karlstad University in Sweden. He is an expert in remedial measures in regulated rivers and is currently leading several projects on river restoration including dam removal and fish passage solutions.

He is also involved in the large EU-projects RIBES (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network) and LIFE Connect (EU-LIFE). The applied research questions are typically identified and developed in collaboration with representatives from the authorities and stakeholders, and deal with real-world problems trying to find practical and cost-efficient solutions to these problems. His expertise is often asked for by authorities, companies and organizations, and public outreach is a central theme in his work.

Pencho is a hydrobiologist who is currently doing his PhD in University of Forestry – Sofia (Bulgaria). His research is focussed on the impact of hydropower plants on river ecosystems, in particular on fish and macroinvertebrates.

Pencho graduated with a Masters degree in Biology in 2015 (Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”). He has worked as part time assistant in Zoology in University of Forestry (2017). As a scholarship holder of the German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU) Pencho has spent one year (2018) in the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB – Berlin), working on river restoration. He is an associate of the National Museum of Natural History at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Pencho has 10 years professional experience as a freelancer focussed on biodiversity projects.

As a member of Balkanka Association (an environmental NGO), Pencho puts a lot of effort into protecting Bulgarian rivers. Balkanka has stopped dozens of devastating projects. Its activity led to demolition of three operational water abstraction facilities in 2020 and 2021.

Apart from hydrobiology, Pencho sometimes works as a field ornithologist. He is keen on fishing and gardening.