In East China’s Fujian Province, the booming economy has been good to the cities of Sanming and Nanping, as well as to farmers in the surrounding hills. That, however, has been bad news for the Min River and to the downstream city of Fuzhou, which gets its water from the Min. As farmers chopped down the trees that anchored the steep slopes of the Min River valley, silt began to pile up in the river as those slopes eroded.

The Min River in Nanping, China. Photograph by Pan Shi Bo, Wikimedia Commons

To ease the burden of filtering out all the silt from its municipal water supply, Fuzhou pays Sanming and Nanping roughly $800 million annually to encourage farmers to reforest the denuded hills and implement sustainable land-use practices. Read more

There’s likely an underground stream in your city, but it may soon be seeing the light.

Uncovering buried streams has had huge impacts in places as diverse as Seattle, Washington, Kalamazoo, Michigan, and even Seoul, Korea—improving local water quality, providing habitat for fish and birds, and turning neglected parking lots and roads into public parks that boost neighbors’ property values and can revitalize entire cities. And city planners everywhere are starting to take note.

The Saw Mill River in Yonkers, New York, is being exposed to fresh air after decades of burial.

In Yonkers, the fourth largest city in New York State, officials are a third done with a “daylighting” project—a term for the opening up of underground streams (see “11 Rivers Forced Underground”). In addition to exposing a waterway that had long been covered, the effort has already sparked plans for a new minor-league ballpark and new housing. Read more

British photographer Joel James Devlin has produced a series of enchanting night images of lakes, streams, and the shore in southern England, by making long exposures at night with a film camera. In the image above, Devlin shot a small light-emitting diode (LED) light floating on the surface of a lake for about 40 minutes. (See “Photographing the Night Sky.”)

Devlin told National Geographic he made most of the photos in the series during the winter months, when the sky was darker and the weather was a bit more turbulent. Devlin said he has long experimented with night photography. Read more

In the delta community of Miguel Alemán, situated along the Colorado River corridor that forms the border between Mexico and Arizona, we arrive at an unlikely enterprise in this parched environment: a tree nursery.

A few thousand cuttings of willow, mesquite, and cottonwoods are lined up in orderly fashion inside a well-tended greenhouse.  Today the mother and son who live here and operate the nursery are painstakingly preparing willow cuttings.  They are employees of Pronatura-Noroeste, the Mexican conservation organization that is working to restore the delta.  In addition to the greenhouses, the nursery includes an eight-acre demonstration plot, where trees of various types and heights are monitored.

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Some 300,000 West Virginians have endured severe water restrictions thanks to a chemical spill in the Elk River, triggering an ongoing environmental investigation.

Al Jones of the West Virginia Department of General Services tests the water in a restroom in Charleston’s State Capitol on January 13, 2014.

Although the 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCMH) spilled into the river is not a typical environmental contaminant, the 5,000 gallons lost in the incident have lessons to teach, say experts, about our vulnerable and aging water infrastructure.

To find out more, National Geographic spoke with Tom Curtis, the deputy executive director of the American Water Works Association, a water industry trade group based in Washington, D.C. Read more