Registration for the event will open in the Fall of 2024. Stay tuned via this page or our Watershed Professionals Newsletter! To join the newsletter, email us at [email protected]. See below for the call for session proposals (due September 1, 2024).
Get Ready for the New Jersey Watershed Conference in 2025
Important Logistics
Main Conference Contact: Pri Oliveira (Outreach & Inclusion Manager) – [email protected].
Conference Date: February 21, 2025 (All-day)
Conference Format: Hybrid (In-Person and Virtual)
In-Person Location: The Brower Student Center at The College of New Jersey in Ewing, NJ
Continuing Education for Professionals: CEUs will be offered for applicable sessions. In the past, we have offered CEU certificates to attending attorneys, engineers, certified floodplain managers, and planners.
2025 Conference Theme
The theme for the New Jersey Watershed Conference this year is “Resiliency through Restoration.”
At the 2025 Watershed Conference, we will discuss strategies and ways to work together so that communities can become more resilient towards climate change and hazards by restoring essential environmental services in degraded watersheds. Water-related impacts of climate change are expected to increase and have greater impacts on our communities in the future. This means more homes repeatedly flooded, more lakes rendered unusable due to harmful algal blooms, and so much more.
Planning for resiliency requires that we establish long-term, flexible, strategies. These strategies should not only address the current challenges we face, but also address future impacts of climate change, whether predicted or unpredictable. Restoration with nature-based and engineered solutions should be a key strategy to address the negative impacts. Such approaches should reduce the amount of stormwater running off impervious surfaces in our highly developed watersheds, increase groundwater recharge to support needs in times of prolonged drought and heat, and help us better achieve regulatory goals for clean water.
Submit a Session Proposal
Deadline: September 1, 2024 (5 p.m. EST)
Submit a session proposal here
We invite you to submit a session proposal for the 8th Annual Watershed Conference. Sessions that align with the conference theme of “Resiliency through Restoration” will be given preference. We are particularly interested in proposals that feature completed restoration plans and projects with studied results. Here are some other things to keep in mind:
- Plan for sessions to be an hour and fifteen minutes long.
- We encourage proposals with various speakers to help share diverse perspectives. As a guide we suggest no more than three speakers per session.
- Reference the list of suggested topics in the proposal form above for examples of topics we are eager to feature at the conference.
- The primary contact will be notified of decisions by October 31, 2024.
Building Collaboration for Our Watersheds
The Watershed Conference offers sessions that will increase knowledge and skills, encourage discussions between stakeholders, and foster collaboration on specific issues and potential solutions. In February 2024, we welcomed hundreds of attendees to a conference about regional approaches to address watershed-wide issues. Our audience includes state, municipal, and county officials and staff, nonprofit organizations, and environmental professionals.
