This online report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is a rich resource on evapotranspiration. The document includes a comprehensive introduction to evapotranspiration, methods of calculation, and an examination of evapotranspiration in crops. The report is easy to navigate with a detailed table of contents; navigational buttons; and links to figures, tables, and...

Maintained by Mariam Balaban, the Desalination Directory Web site offers over 12,000 entries consisting of government and academic institutions, companies, and individuals in the field of desalination and water reuse. The individuals, companies and institution, cumulative and the Office of Saline Water categories are searchable by keyword, while the associations, publications, and events...

Provided by the World Resources Institute (WRI) with assistance from several sponsors, EarthTrends is an environmental information portal, offering searchable databases, data tables, country profiles, maps, and feature articles in ten topical sections. These include Coastal and Marine Ecosystems, Climate and Atmosphere, Agriculture and Food, and Forests and Grasslands, among others. The databases...

Launched in 1998 by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the Freshwater Initiative aims "to protect the plants and animals dependent on freshwaters and develop solutions to key causes of freshwater biodiversity decline." To achieve this goal, Freshwater Initiative staff identifies sites that harbor critical aquatic biodiversity, targets conservation activities at several key freshwater sites, and...

As mentioned in this Web site -- a free Web Focus from the journal Nature -- over one billion people in the world already lack access to clean water, a crisis that will only intensify as the global population swells and freshwater resource continue to dwindle. Nature offers an analysis of the situation with news stories, features and editorials, interactive graphics, and an archived article from...

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has recently placed online three reports focusing on conservation efforts in the Asia/Pacific region. Offered in .pdf format, all three reports provide overviews of WWF's current (the reports were originally published in 1997 and 1998) and planned efforts in their respective areas of concern, both at the regional and national levels. While aimed particularly at WWF...

Another informative Web site from the Environmental Protection Agency is the Online Training in Watershed Management page. Here, citizens have access to a wealth of information and tools to help them understand and protect their water resources. Six "modules" are offered, each of which take between a half to two hours to complete. They are organized by theme including an Introduction, watershed...

Maintained by the USGS Water Web Server Team, the Selected Water-Resources Abstracts Web site was compiled from several sources on the subject of water resources since 1977. Users can search by report number, keyword, author, hydrologic unit, state, and year. The database gives researchers easy access to specific information among the vast array of publications distributed by the agency.

Convened in March 2003 in Japan, the 3rd World Water Forum dealt with 38 interlocked themes concerning how to bring safe water and sanitation to the world. Considered the most important international water meeting to date, the forum hosted close to 24,000 persons from 182 countries. On this well-designed site, users can read various documents presented at the Forum, along with reading the daily...

The United States Society on Dams (USSD) is a professional organization that promotes the advancement of dam engineering and technology, and fosters public awareness of the importance of dams. The best feature on the society's home page is its excellent introduction to dams and their benefits. First, a short definition of a dam is given, and then some reasons for their construction are outlined...