Elevated Houses and Multiple Lines of Defense in the Louisiana Wetlands and in the Missouri and Tennessee Wetlands

In January as we were all talking about the inauguration of a new president and his stimulus program, I wrote several times about infrastructure as stimulus. I included this graphic that comes from the Comprehensive Recommendations Supporting the Use of the Multiple Lines of Defense Strategy to Sustain Coastal Louisiana, published in August 2007. The writers’ strategy [...]

Conservation Buffers, Water Quality, and the Dead Zone

When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, it regulated sewage produced in our houses and businesses. It did not regulate water that washes off our streets and farm fields. What washes off our farm fields in the Midwest ends up in the Gulf of Mexico.  Freshwater is lighter than salt water. When it [...]

Columbia Bottoms at the Confluence

 
Yesterday, I ventured up to Columbia Bottoms at the Confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers with three very good friends. We had a good hike and a picnic and shared the viewing platform with 65 fifth graders from High Ridge, Missouri.
Until a few years ago the confluence was a great deep mystery, something we [...]

Lock and Dam 26, Alton, Illinois

 
Yesterday at Riverlands, Congress’s gift to anglers and birders at Lock and Dam 26, the dam was wide open, the river bank-full, and the anglers  out in force. 
One guy had a huge catfish on a spear; a second had a string of big-mouth carp  hitched to a large piece of driftwood. Disturb a big-mouth with the [...]

Confluence and the North American Wetlands Conservation Act

 
The Migratory Bird Conservation Commission, chaired by Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar, approved a $999,570 grant under the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s North American Wetlands Conservation Act (NAWCA) for wetland restoration in the Confluence Region of Missouri.
The Great Rivers Habitat Alliance calls this peninsula the Confluence Floodway and this region between the Missouri and [...]

Dead Zone

Whale Sharks in the Gulf of Mexico
During the Flood of 2008 tons of nutrients and fertilizers washed off midwestern farm fields and into the Mississippi River, which carried it to the Gulf of Mexico, where it nourished algae blooms and the growth of plankton.
This is an annual occurrence. 
Commercial fishing crews first began sighting whale sharks [...]

Wetlands as Infrastructure

 
 

Missouri Sister Island: Dry Bayou/Thompson Bend
Mississippi County, Missouri
South of Horseshoe Lake and just north of its confluence with the Ohio, the Mississippi makes a great S, slightly canted northwest to southwest, enclosing two point bars, Dogtooth Island in Illinois on the west and Dry Bayou/Thompson Bend in Missouri on the east. Both lie within the [...]