Environmental flow prescriptions have become increasingly available to river managers around the world to help guide dam operations. These prescriptions are now commonly developed using holistic methods and are supported by both river-specific knowledge and the fundamental principles of river science. Yet the graduation of environmental flow prescriptions from planning to implementation remains more limited. The Sustainable Rivers Project (SRP) was formalized in 2002, as a national partnership between the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and The Nature Conservancy for defining and implementing environmental flows through adaptive reservoir management. The SRP initially focused on eight demonstration basins containing 36 USACE dams, through which innovations in methods and tools have been developed and applied in varying ecological, socio-economic, and political settings across the United States. The long-term goal of the SRP is to direct the collective experience from these demonstration sites to help guide agency-wide implementation of environmental flows through adaptive management of as many as 600 dams, to benefit an estimated 80,000 river kilometres and tens of thousands of hectares of related floodplain and estuarine habitat. While work continues in the original eight basins, successes and failures to date have been more broadly instructive, and have helped catalyze and inform environmental flow work on an additional 26 USACE dams. This presentation will summarize the results and over-arching lessons learned to date from the SRP, along with related issues such as climate change, potential benefits of integrated reservoir-floodplain management, broader sustainable water infrastructure efforts, and aging infrastructure as opportunity.