Freeflow is an ecological consulting organization created in response to a growing interest in Canada and beyond to evaluate and maintain ecological connectivity in freshwater ecosystems. Indeed, Canada is home to a considerable portion of the world's freshwaters. Given this vast natural heritage, Canadians are committed to the protection and preservation of these vital ecosystems. As a recent signatory to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework Canada has made clear their commitment to enhancing biodiversity through restoration (Target 2), protecting at least 30% of inland waters (Target 3), and mitigating the impacts of invasive species (Target 6). Connectivity of freshwater habitats is an essential component touching on all of these targets: the restoration of ecological connectivity can enhance biodiversity by linking species to important habitats to complete their life history, the benefit of protecting additional inland waters can be maximized by considering hotspots of species migrations, and the distribution of aquatic barriers on rivers are known to limit the spread of aquatic invasive species. We believe connectivity analyses of freshwater ecosystems have an important place in a portfolio of indicators with the aim of monitoring and enhancing biological integrity.

We have worked with ministries at multiple levels (provincial and federal) to develop workflows for the analysis of ecological connectivity in river ecosystems. We have also partnered with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) to develop new and efficient computational tools to calculate freshwater connectivity indices.