This book presents the results of an eight-year research project (1998–2006) in the Great Lakes region of the US to develop methods and estimates of costs and benefits of water management. Many different types of water management and river restoration issues are addressed, including dam removal, mining problems and pesticide pollution. The book discusses the political economy of water management, the use of economic valuation results for market and non-market goods and services in political decision-making surrounding river management, including benefits capture and internalization, implementation of the beneficiary and polluter pays principle, and other equity issues related to the distribution of costs and benefits across various stakeholders. So, the book provides a wide variety of practical examples of economic assessments of river management projects. The first part of the book provides an introduction to ecological engineering and the basic economic principles of environmental valuation of river systems. The impact of engineering works on ecosystems are described, and the scale at which, for instance, dams have ecologic and economic impacts due to ecosystem connectivity. One of the case studies illustrates how ecological modelling can improve the reliability of scenario building in valuation studies. The next chapters present different case studies of surface water quality management and dam removal. In the contingent valuation (CV) studies, important topics pass in review, such as hypothetical bias, the effect of elicitation method, sensitivity to scope, order and context effects. Furthermore, illustrations are provided of the application of different marginal utility of income weights in the aggregation of willingness-to-pay (WTP) over the entire population and other distributional effects that policy scenarios can cause. Other studies combine revealed and stated preference methods, or apply benefits transfer to estimate a wide set of possible benefits. The book also includes an example of land-use modelling of non-point source pollution that accounts for upstream causes and downstream consequences. Although the studies employ a rich array of cost-based, hedonic pricing, travel cost methods, and benefits transfer approaches, the overall scientific contribution of the book