Flood control along the Mississippi River is a central piece of a newly passed federal law — work that advocates believe is critical as the river basin sees more frequent and severe extreme weather events due to climate change. 

The Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) is passed by Congress every two years. It gives authority to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to undertake projects and studies to improve the nation’s water resources. 

Signed into law Jan. 4, this year’s package includes studies on increased flooding in the upper basin, flood mitigation measures throughout the river system, ecological restoration, and a $6 billion floodwall in Louisiana. 

The Mississippi River is managed in large part by the Army Corps, so it often features prominently in the bill, with a dual aim of making the river more suitable for shipping and restoring environmental degradation from flooding, nutrient pollution and climate change. 

Kirsten Wallace, executive director of the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association, called this year’s WRDA “a pretty special one.” She said it contained wins for many of the diverse stakeholders along the river, including shippers, environmental advocates, riverfront communities and federal and state agencies — who don’t always agree. 

Advocates lauded the law’s emphasis on nature-based solutions. In a press release, Stephanie Bailenson, policy team lead for The Nature Conservancy, said, “Since 2016, Congress has directed the Corps to consider natural and nature-based solutions alongside or instead of traditional infrastructure. This latest act continues that trend.”

But all of these projects are only promised, because funding doesn’t come until later, when Congress appropriates it. Many projects authorized in previous versions of the law are still unfunded, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Here’s what will affect the river in the Water Resources Development Act of 2024: 

Study of flood risk on the upper Mississippi River

The law authorizes a large-scale study of flooding on the Upper Mississippi River System, which includes the Mississippi River from its headwaters to where it meets the Ohio River at Cairo, Illinois, as well as the Illinois River and portions of some smaller tributaries.

The upper river has seen two major floods in the last few years; one in 2023, and one in 2019, which lasted for months and caused billions of dollars in damage. 

The study’s chief goal: figuring out how to reduce flood risk across the entire river system, instead of relying on municipalities to try to solve flooding problems themselves, which can sometimes have impacts downstream. North of St. Louis, for example, levees constrain the river to protect communities and valuable farmland from flooding — and some levee districts have raised those levees higher, safeguarding themselves but effectively pushing floodwaters faster downstream. 

“This plan allows more of a comprehensive way for levee districts to improve what they currently have … in a way that doesn’t put them in a position to be adversarial or just impose risk somewhere else,” Wallace said. 

She said the study will be a challenge, but that levee districts are eager for solutions as flood risks and heavier rainfall increase. 

Once the study receives funding, it will be led by the Army Corps’ St. Louis District, Wallace said. It’ll solicit input from cities, towns and ports along the river, recreators, the shipping industry and federal environmental agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey. 

Flood projects for cities from the headwaters to the delta 

Cities and towns along the river could get help for the localized effects of flooding too, thanks to several projects authorized by the law. Upstream, that includes La Crosse, Wisconsin, which will enter into an agreement with the Army Corps to study the role of the city’s levees, which were constructed around the river’s record flood in 1965. 

“We have to have an eye on maintaining what we’ve got and looking toward the future and whatever conditions the river might undergo to be prepared as best we can,” said Matthew Gallager, the city’s director of engineering and public works. “Because obviously, nature is going to win.” 

Downriver, Louisiana secured the largest project authorization within the law. To protect communities in St. Tammany Parish, a county north of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana plans to build a $5.9 billion levee and floodwall system totaling 18.5 miles in length to protect over 26,000 structures, most of which are family homes. 

The St. Tammany Flood Risk Management Project is slated to receive $3.7 billion in federal funding. The other 35% will come from non-federal sponsors, such as the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA). 

“By authorizing the St. Tammany project for construction, Congress recognizes again the national importance of Louisiana and that CPRA can work with the Federal Government to execute a multi-billion coastal protection project successfully,” said CPRA Chairman Gordy Dove.

The law also authorizes a federal study of the Lake Pontchartrain Storm Surge Reduction Project, a component of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan meant to protect nine parishes bordering the lake. The Army Corps will investigate whether the proposed project to reduce flood risk is in the federal interest. 

Other approved flood control projects will be funded along the lower Mississippi River and its tributaries, including the Ouachita River in Louisiana. Several counties in Mississippi will also receive funding to improve environmental infrastructure, such as water and wastewater systems. 

Near Memphis, the bill authorizes the Hatchie-Loosahatchie Ecosystem Restoration project, which covers a 39-mile stretch of the lower Mississippi River. The project aims to manage flood risks while also restoring and sustaining the health, productivity and biological diversity of the flyway. 

In New Orleans, a study was authorized to investigate ecosystem restoration and water supply issues, such as the mitigation of future saltwater wedges that threaten drinking water and wetlands at the very end of the Mississippi River. 

More support for the Upper Mississippi River Restoration program 

The law also increases the amount of money Congress can give to the Upper Mississippi River Restoration program, which funds habitat restoration activities and scientific research on the upper river. 

Congress increased the money it can direct to the research part of the program by $10 million, bringing the total the program can get to $100 million annually. 

The boost “really is a recognition of the value of the science … the understanding that has improved about how the system is functioning over the last three decades,” said Marshall Plumley, the Army Corps’ regional manager for the program. 

If given extra funding, Plumley said program staff want to use it to better understand the effects of the increased amount of water that has flowed through the river in recent years. That increase, partly attributed to wetter conditions due to climate change, is changing the river’s floodplain habitats, including forests and backwater areas. 

A change to how new water infrastructure gets funded

The Mississippi River functions as a water superhighway, transporting around $500 million tons of goods each year. Infrastructure to keep shipping running smoothly is costly, and one adjustment in WRDA 2024 is aimed at shifting the burden of those costs. 

Taxpayers have been funding inland waterway infrastructure for nearly two centuries, but Congress established the Inland Waterways Trust Fund in 1978, which requires the private shipping industry to pitch in. 

Today, the trust fund’s coffers are filled by a 29-cent per gallon diesel tax on commercial operators that use the Mississippi River and other inland waterways, adding up to about $125 million per year in recent years. New construction — like wider, more modern locks and dams on the upper river — is paid for through a public-private partnership: the private dollars in the fund, and federal dollars allocated by Congress. 

Until recently, the private dollars covered 35% of new construction costs and federal dollars covered 65%. The new WRDA adjusts that to 25% and 75%, respectively. 

Advocates for the shipping industry have long believed taxpayers should have a bigger hand in funding construction because it’s not just shippers who benefit from an efficient river. 

The balance in the trust fund “always limits” construction that can happen in a given year, said Jen Armstrong, director of government relations for the Waterways Council. 

“We can’t afford to have projects take three decades or two decades to complete,” Armstrong said, “because we have other locks that are deteriorating.” 

Armstrong said she believes shifting more of the cost to the federal government will accelerate those projects. 

Not everyone supports the cost share change, however, including American Rivers, which has opposed the creation of new locks on the upper Mississippi in favor of helping the river revert to more natural processes. 

Kelsey Cruickshank, the group’s director of policy and government relations, called it “a disappointing development that continues to give short shrift to the incredible ecosystem of the world’s third-largest freshwater river system.”

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the upper river experienced major floods in 2022, the floods were in 2023. This story has been updated. 

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The Nature Conservancy and American Rivers also receive Walton funding.

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DE SOTO, Wis. — Jerry Boardman doesn’t remember exactly when he started collecting acorns in the fall.

But the thousands upon thousands of them he gathers to share with people working to improve habitat along the Mississippi River makes the 81-year-old resident of De Soto, Wisconsin, a small village between La Crosse and Prairie du Chien, a pretty big deal.

“It’s like a myth or a legend,” Andy Meier, a forester for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who receives a portion of Boardman’s bounty, said of the integral role it plays in his work. “It just has always been that way.”

In reality, Boardman began collecting around the time that the need for acorns — a nut that contains the seed that grows oak trees — was growing critical. For the past few decades, the trees that grow in the Mississippi River floodplain, known as floodplain forests, have been struggling. Although they’re named for their ability to withstand the river’s seasonal flooding, they’ve recently been overwhelmed by higher water and longer-lasting floods.

Overall, forest cover along the stretch of the river from Minnesota down to Clinton, Iowa decreased by roughly 6% between 1989 and 2010, according to a 2022 report on ecological trends on the upper Mississippi. In the years since, losses in some places have neared 20% — and were particularly acute following a massive flood event in 2019. 

What exactly is driving the excess water isn’t fully fleshed out, but climate change and changes in land use that cause water to run off the landscape faster are likely factors.

The result is mass stretches of dead trees that can no longer perform their functions of providing wildlife habitat, sucking up pollutants that would otherwise run downriver and slowing water during floods.  

Floodplain forests in the lower section of the river are also diminished. The Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, which stretches from where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers meet, in Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico was once almost entirely forest. Today, about 30% of that land is treed.  

Government agencies and various nonprofits are attempting to reverse the forestland decline by planting new trees and volunteers like Boardman are key to the effort. 

Local is best

Reno Bottoms, a sprawling wetland habitat on the river near Boardman’s hometown of De Soto, is one place where tree die-off has been extensive. Boardman, who has been a commercial fisherman, hunter and trapper on the river for most of his life, called the change in forest cover in recent years “shocking.” To combat it, he puts in about 100 hours a year between August and October gathering acorns from the floodplain in De Soto, Prairie du Chien and La Crosse. 

To maximize his time, Boardman uses a contraption not unlike ones used to pick up tennis balls to scoop up the acorns. One small variety, though, requires one to “get down on your hiney or your knees” to pick them up, he said. For those, he relies on a little grunt work.

The idea is that if the trees that produced the acorns were successful enough at warding off flood damage to drop seeds, those seeds might be similarly resilient if replanted.

Boardman looks for acorns from the bur oak, pin oak and swamp white oak, the latter of which is particularly well-suited to the floodplain forest. And the numbers he puts up are impressive — last year, he collected about 130,000; this year, 65,000.

He splits up the total to give to the Army Corps and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, both of which have foresters planting trees to restore floodplain habitat.

“Pretty much everything that Jerry collects, in one way or another, will return to the river,” said Meier, with the Corps.

Last fall, for example, they scattered between 20,000 and 30,000 of Boardman’s swamp white oak acorns near McGregor Lake, a river backwater near Prairie du Chien where the Corps is piloting an effort to protect trees from flood inundation by raising the forest floor a few inches.

This spring, Meier said, he was “blown away” by the approximately 1,000 seedlings that had taken root there and begun to sprout.

Having access to Boardman’s acorns is important because it gives them the chance to experiment with direct seeding, instead of buying young trees and planting them. Direct seeding is both cheaper and more likely to result in a viable tree, because the seed is local.

“When we have an opportunity to get something we know came from the river, we know that it’s adapted to growing there,” Meier said.

Not every community has a Boardman, though, and many organizations doing reforestation work have to shell out for seed or look for options from further afield. 

For example, M&C Forest Seeds, based in Clarendon, Arkansas, pays seed collectors cash for acorns and then re-sells sorted seed to government agencies or nonprofits. M&C contracts with collectors to gather acorns at particular latitudes along the river, which they then market to replanting efforts at similar geographic locations. 

Living Lands and Waters, an Illinois-based environmental organization uses nurseries to cultivate oaks from the region and distributes more than 150,000 trees annually in three-gallon pots to volunteers or individuals. 

Little by little, through the efforts of various government agencies and nonprofits, it all ends up in the ground. 

For instance, since 2007, Living Lands and Waters has planted more than two million trees along waterways in the Mississippi River Basin. The Nature Conservancy, using U.S. Department of Agriculture and other program funds, has reforested about a million acres across Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas in the last 30 years. Much of that acreage was on low-lying farmland prone to flooding that had once been forest.

Volunteers key to planting efforts

Whether collecting seeds or planting them, volunteers like Boardman are key to making the work happen. 

Ev Wick, a fifth grade teacher at De Soto’s Prairie View Elementary, has taken his students out for an acorn-gathering day with Boardman for the past several years. Boardman scouts the best trees ahead of time, Wick said, then the kids get to work. They can pick up between 5,000 and 6,000 in a day, propelled by friendly competitions to see who can collect the most or fill their bucket quickest.

They’re interested when Boardman tells them all the acorns they collect will eventually be planted on the islands they see in the river, Wick said. 

Last October, Living Lands and Water brought together people from groups like the Clean River Advisory Council and the Rock Island County Soil and Water Conservation District to plant oak trees near the Quad Cities. Volunteers planted 85 oak trees in a park by the Mississippi River, in Illinois City, Illinois. This event helped restore forests but also provided opportunities for people to learn and connect with nature.

“We get individuals that may have never planted a tree before but want to come out because it sounds like a cool, fun thing,” said Dan Breidenstein, Vice President of Living Lands and Water. “Not only did they learn how to plant a tree, but they also learned about these different species that we were doing. Every time they visit that area or drive past that building, they’re connected to the area around them, and that tree’s not going anywhere.” 

Organizers are particularly tickled when young people show up.

“My favorite part of today is being outside and in the environment because I don’t go outside much,” said Brooklyn Wilson, a high school junior who volunteered at the October event. “The most important thing to understand is that as a community we need to be able to come together and help and pick up and do what we need to do to better our environment and neighborhoods.” 

Perhaps some of the young volunteers will follow in Boardman’s footsteps. 

As for Boardman, the chance to donate acorns or otherwise help out is a no brainer.

“That river has given me so much,” he said. “I’ve just got to give back all I can give.”

Disclosure: the Desk, The Nature Conservancy and the Clean River Advisory Council receive funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri. Support our independent reporting network with a donation.

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SHELBY, Wisconsin — If she closes her eyes, Danelle Larson can still remember how the stretch of Mississippi River in front of her looked as recent as a decade ago: nothing but open, muddy water.

Today, it’s covered with impressively tall and thick beds of wild rice.

Larson, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and Alicia Carhart, Mississippi River vegetation specialist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, surveyed the plants by airboat in mid-September. Summer floods on the river delayed growth somewhat, but the tall green shoots still waved in the breeze in almost every direction off the shores of Goose Island County Park near La Crosse.

“It’s one of the most dramatic changes on the upper Mississippi,” Larson said. “It’s everywhere.”

In the past several years, wild rice has exploded on this part of the upper river, particularly on a section of it called Pool 4, near Alma, and Pool 8, near La Crosse. Historical records show it was common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but poor water quality and other problems caused widespread aquatic vegetation die-offs in the 1980s.

For some, the resurgence is a source of wonder. For others, it’s more of a nuisance, making it hard to maneuver boats through areas that were once easily passable.

But what’s driving the substantial increase in growth is still largely a mystery.

Mississippi River wild rice is tall, resilient and expanding fast

Wild rice is an annual plant, meaning it completes its entire life cycle in one growing season and then dies. The seeds germinate in spring, then sprout to lie flat on the water like ribbons during their floating-leaf stage. During the summer months, the plants emerge from the water, and new seeds ripen and drop into the river in early fall to start the process over again.

The place now known as Wisconsin has a rich history of wild rice harvesting dating back thousands of years with the Menominee, the original people of the area who were named “People of the Wild Rice.” Wild rice, or manoomin, is also closely associated with Ojibwe tribes who arrived in Wisconsin hundreds of years ago in search of “food that grows on water.”

Today, it’s still a central part of tribal diets and identity, but it’s facing serious threats from climate change, fluctuating water levels and human interference. This year, storms and heavy rains in June negatively impacted wild rice production across northern Wisconsin.

The rice growing on the upper Mississippi is different. It can reach about 12 feet tall, while plants in northern Wisconsin lakes are typically waist-high — far easier to shake into a boat to harvest, Larson said.

And it appears to be more resilient to water fluctuations. Carhart said everything she’s read about wild rice would indicate it’s extremely sensitive, but much of it survived the high water earlier this summer — and last year, when the river was in drought, it was more prevalent than she’d ever seen.

“That’s what’s maybe most confusing,” she said. “The rice just seems to be doing well regardless.”

This year, wild rice was identified at 30% of the DNR’s 450 regular sampling sites on the river near La Crosse, Carhart said.

Data from a wide-ranging 2022 report on the upper river’s ecological status and trends backs this up — prevalence of wild rice in pools 4 and 8 increased by “an order of magnitude” in the past decade, the report’s authors wrote, covering thousands of hectares.

The greatest changes have occurred in places where rice has moved into deeper waters, Carhart said. Previously, wild rice was most commonly found in the still, shallow backwater areas of the river. Now, it’s thriving just as much in the river’s main channel, where the water moves quicker and is disturbed more regularly by boats and wind.

The rice appears to be “marching downstream,” Larson said, appearing sporadically on the river down to Wisconsin’s border with Illinois. It has not yet been identified farther south on the Iowa-Illinois border.

Better water quality could be driving the increase

The 2022 report noted that aquatic vegetation in general is thriving on the upper Mississippi between Wisconsin and Minnesota, and water clarity has improved.

Such an improvement may be making it easier for wild rice to establish, but the fact that it’s surging in some places and not others means there’s probably more to the story, Carhart said.

Others think it may be linked to sediment building up in the backwaters, making them shallower and more amenable to the wild rice plant.

Larson said she hopes to do more research about the rice’s habitat preferences to learn more about why it’s increasing in some areas and not others.

She also wants to know more about what kinds of animals use the wild rice and for what purpose. It’s an important food source for ducks, for example, and marsh birds like to hide in the dead stalks as the weather turns colder.

Wild rice is just one way the river is changing

Not everyone is thrilled with the rice’s expansion — particularly those who’ve watched the water they used for recreation turn into a giant rice bed. Lake Onalaska, a large reservoir of the river, is one such place.

In the 1980s, there were a few stands of wild rice on the lake, said Marc Schultz, chairman of the Lake Onalaska Protection and Rehabilitation District. It started expanding about a decade ago, “almost with a vengeance,” he described.

The rapid change even triggered now-dispelled rumors that people were intentionally planting wild rice in the lake.

The problem is that Lake Onalaska is a major draw in the region for fishing and boating. Despite having established “boat channels,” the rice just keeps growing, Schultz said, making it difficult for boaters to get from one side of the lake to the other — or even from their dock to the boat channel itself. And while the lake district can pay to clear it, that’s costly.

Schultz said he’s long viewed wild rice as a valuable resource. But he sympathizes with people who have seen changes to the river accelerate in recent years because of climate change and land use changes.

“They look at rice and say, ‘That’s just another one of those things that’s changing everything,'” he said. “You can understand why people have a lot of concerns.”

This summer’s flood cut back some wild rice growth on Lake Onalaska, but Carhart said she met with the group last year to hear out their worries.

She asked them to consider what the lake might look like if it was all gone — the water would be more turbid, for example, and fish that like clearer water could be driven away.

Larson recalled what the river used to look like when she was a kid: muddy and not safe to swim in.

“Now, it’s pretty crystal clear,” she said. “The plants seem to love it too.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri Support our independent reporting network with a donation.

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CLAYTON, Iowa — The Sny Magill Unit of Effigy Mounds National Monument is a hidden wonder.

A dozen miles downstream from the park’s visitor center along the Mississippi River, the path starts with a turn you might miss if you’re not looking closely. Follow that path under a railroad bridge to a boat landing, then go by foot through the woods until the floodplain opens out flat in front of you, revealing more than 100 sacred mounds built by Native Americans thousands of years ago.

These ceremonial and burial mounds are one of the densest collections still existing in North America. It’s clear the people who built them had a special connection to the river valley cradled between the bluffs of the Driftless region, and wanted to add their own features to it, said park superintendent Susan Snow.

Today, though, that river has significantly eroded the bank they built on, eating away at some of the mounds at the water’s edge.

It’s a product both of climate change, which is causing wetter conditions across the upper Midwest, and engineered alterations to the river’s flow. There’s now an urgent need to protect the mounds from further damage, Snow said. A multimillion-dollar bank stabilization project proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could accomplish that.

Since mounds should not be rebuilt by modern hands, once they’re gone, they’re gone, said Sunshine Thomas Bear, tribal historic preservation officer for the Winnebago Nation of Nebraska, who are descended from the mound builders.

“All we can do is try to save what we can,” she said.

Fast-flowing Mississippi River causing mound erosion

Nineteen tribal nations are affiliated with the mounds that make up the Sny Magill Unit, including the Ho-Chunk Nation, which has a strong presence in Wisconsin.

“The area itself is part of our homeland,” Bear said. “Our connection to these lands goes back thousands of years.”

Bear said the area around Effigy Mounds National Monument used to have more ancient Indigenous mounds, but many were destroyed in the last 150 years by developers as towns were built. And many other mounds were destroyed by amateur archeologists in the last century who desecrated the burial mounds and stole artifacts and human remains.

Most of the approximately 106 mounds that are part of the Sny Magill Unit are conical — or round — which are likely burial mounds, said Sheila Oberreuter, the park’s museum technician. Others are effigy mounds taking the shapes of birds and bears. It’s likely that ancient peoples returned to the area for hundreds, if not thousands, of years for mound building during the Woodland period, Oberreuter said, which occurred between 2,500 and 900 years ago.

Because it is low-lying, the land on which the mounds were built floods seasonally when the Mississippi floods. Sometimes, the mounds themselves are completely underwater, Oberreuter said — something that would seem unbelievable while walking among them, if not for visible high-water marks on nearby trees.

The serene backwater adjacent to the mounds is connected to the Mississippi River’s main channel by Johnson Slough. In recent decades, more water has rushed through the slough and hit the river bank, which Snow estimated has eroded the bank by five to 10 feet since the 1940s.

That’s happening in part because of the construction of the lock and dam system on the upper Mississippi River during the 1930s, which transformed the way the river ran to make shipping easier. By converting the free-flowing river into a series of pools, the lock and dam system causes consistent high water levels in some areas. On top of that, heavier rainfall and more severe, longer-lasting flooding events driven by climate change caused more water to move through the upper Mississippi in the last few decades.

Notes from park staff as early as the 1980s mention mound erosion, Snow said, with the first project proposed to stop it in 1994. Wooden support beams were placed along the bank, but were washed out. Reinforcing those beams didn’t work either. In 2022, large logs made of coconut fiber were placed along the parts of the bank experiencing the worst erosion. The following spring, the river saw near-record flooding, and many of those logs were swept from the bank immediately.

Army Corps project would stabilize bank with 2,000-foot rock berm

As park staff considered a more permanent solution, they were approached by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has managed the Mississippi River for decades and recently unlocked a new pool of money that funds ecosystem improvements along the river in addition to improvements to navigation for shipping.

The Navigation and Ecosystem Sustainability Program, or NESP, as it’s commonly called, also supports the protection of cultural resources along the river, said Jill Bathke, lead planner of the program. The Sny Magill project would be the first to access it for that protection.

After consulting with tribal officials, the Army Corps put forth a proposed fix: a 2,000-foot long berm the height of the floodplain, made of large rocks. They’ll place sand scraped out of the main channel behind the rock wall as an added barrier between the water and the mounds. The berm would be designed with current and future climate conditions in mind, Bathke said, a long-term solution to stop the erosion.

Bear and other members of her tribe are serving as consultants on the project, as is William Quackenbush, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin, and his tribe. They also lead teams of volunteers to help care for the mounds, which includes removing invasive European plants and replacing them with native plants that reduce soil erosion.

Some are skeptical of this manmade solution to a manmade problem. There are some tribal partners who’ve expressed that the river should be allowed to keep flowing as it wants to, Oberreuter said. Snow also acknowledged that people have been hesitant about making such a change to the natural bank.

But, she pointed out, “The bank is (already) no longer what it was.”

Construction of the rock berm should begin in 2026. As they build, they’ll have to take care not to harm a population of federally protected freshwater mussels that live buried in the sand at the river bottom. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the land around the Sny Magill Unit and Johnson Slough as part of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, will help with that.

When the berm is complete, Snow said, there’ll be a trail atop it that visitors can walk. That may help protect the mounds better than the current way to see them, which is to walk among them, she said.

The Sny Magill Unit has been part of Effigy Mounds National Monument since 1962, Snow said, but it’s not advertised like the rest of the park. That’s in part because there are no staff stationed there to properly guide people through the mounds. But if people visit respectfully, she believes it’s one of the best places to take in the mounds because it’s on a flat, walkable surface, unlike the rest of the park, which is on a blufftop.

For Bear, that education is key to the mounds’ survival. She believes many of those who visit leave with a better understanding of the mounds, and why they need to be protected.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. Republish stories like this one for free.

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MARQUETTE, Iowa — It was just before sunset on the Mississippi River, the day’s last bits of golden light dancing on the water, when four members of the band Big Blue Sky picked up their instruments for one of their defining songs.

During the summer, the group plays Friday nights for Maiden Voyage Tours, a northeast Iowa riverboat company. Its 40-some passengers that evening had been sharing bottles of wine and hearing tales of Mississippi River history as they cruised along, speedboats occasionally racing by on either side.

Then the boat captain pulled over to an island and cut the motor. It was time for the water song.

Moving and unforgettable, “Water Song” urges listeners to think about how they treat the natural resource, so vital for life on earth. The tune was written in 2015 and came together in minutes, recalled Big Blue Sky singers and songwriters Jon Stravers and Sophia Landis. Much of the group’s music is about the river and the surrounding region, a place of curiosity, adventure and solace for Stravers and his late son, Jon-Jon.

Big Blue Sky’s work adds to a centuries-long tradition of music inspired and transported by the Mississippi River. The river’s role as a major shipping artery and a force of nature, as well as its historical and cultural significance to the nation, make it an easy thing to write about. And riverboats not altogether different from this one carried songs north and south, spreading jazz and the delta blues across the heart of the country.

Most importantly, the music describes people’s personal connections to the river — something intensely evident in Stravers’ words on the boat.

In song, he and Landis rhapsodized. In speaking, he kept it simple: “This is a good stretch of the river. It’s important. And people love it.”

Mississippi River moved and shaped jazz, delta blues

Perhaps no style of music is as intertwined with the Mississippi River as the delta blues, rooted in the musical traditions of enslaved Black Americans who were forced to work long hours in the fields of the Mississippi Delta region. Though slavery had technically ended, many Black Americans remained in unfair and oppressive working conditions at the turn of the 20th century.

Unlike gospel music sung in church, blues reflected their real lives and real feelings, said Maie Smith, group tour manager and operations manager at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

“Delta blues music is a music that works from the heart to the outside,” Smith said. “It starts with your most inner being, and helps to lift you up and rise you above whatever circumstances you were in.”

Lots of delta blues musicians worked on the river, Smith said, including those forced to build levees to protect fields from floodwaters. They endured the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which killed upwards of a thousand people and displaced almost 640,000 people from Illinois to Louisiana. Many songs were written about this historic disaster and other river floods, including Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” Barbecue Bob’s “Mississippi Heavy Water Blues,” Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues” and Big Bill Broonzy’s “Southern Flood Blues.”

But the river also provided opportunities for blues musicians to travel, taking their songs with them. Blues and later jazz music came north to Memphis, Kansas City and Chicago, building a following and mixing with other music styles. Today, blues riffs underpin much of American popular music, Smith said, like rock and roll and hip hop.

Music was moving on the Mississippi even before then — during the so-called “golden age of steamboats” in the 19th century. Thousands of steamboats traveled the river and its major tributaries during that time, said Steve Marking, a river historian and guest performer for American Cruise Lines on its Mississippi River cruises.

The boats took on passengers as well as freight, and companies sought to hire the best musicians to entice people to pay to board, Marking said. Later, even influential jazz musician Louis Armstrong performed for a few years on the Streckfus Steamboat Line.

Other forms of music that arose and were popularized on the river include ragtime in St. Louis and river folk music that featured banjo, fiddle and percussion. Dixieland, a form of jazz, and country music also owe a debt to the river. 

Why capture the Mississippi River in song?

Rivers in general “have inspired almost as many songs as love,” Marking said.

Many people have some sort of connection with them, whether it’s traveling them by boat or simply watching them run. Marking pointed to the song “Watchin’ the River Go By,” by John Hartford, which depicts two people who get together each night on the porch to watch the Ohio River. It’s an experience anyone, young or old, can relate to, he said (well, maybe not completely — the people in the song do so in the nude).

But more than lakes, forests or prairies, rivers are captured in song over and over again. Why?

It could be their heavy symbolism. For Marking, rivers signify the passage of time, reminding us of our journey through life.

“If you’re standing on the shore,” he said, “upstream is the past, downstream is the future.”

Rivers also make a connection — between places, or even between the past and the future.

The musicians who still travel the river today are helping make that connection, Marking said, including the ones who make up Big Blue Sky. He described taking the boat tour and listening to them play “Water Song” as “one of the top five events of my entire life.”

It’s easy to see why. The group’s music both honors the river’s musical traditions and adds something new: an eye toward its ecological importance. In between songs, passengers got to hear about Stravers’ decades of bird research on this stretch of the river, including monitoring of the cerulean warbler, one of the rarest nesting warblers in Iowa. They stopped to watch a beaver on an island waddle through the sand to make his way back to the water. And they were granted what the captain called one of the best sunsets of the summer: a bright, show-stopping pink.

Though most of their songs evolve over time, Stravers said, “Water Song” pretty much gets played the same every time. The exception is in his echo to Landis’s main melody, where he regularly inserts the name of whatever water body they’re playing on to remind listeners they need it to live.

Sacred Mississippi River water, indeed. 

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

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VIROQUA, Wis. — Sheldon Auto Wrecking is a local institution in southwestern Wisconsin’s Vernon County. It’s tucked in a lush valley just downstream of a 50-foot earthen dam, locally known as “Maple Dale.” 

The salvage yard, which buys used vehicles and farm machinery in this rural area to sell for parts, has been in business for nearly 70 years. For most of those years, the dam — less than a half-mile up the road — has protected its yard of hundreds of old cars and broken-down equipment from frequent and sometimes severe flooding in the area.

The dam “was put in place for a reason,” said owner Greg Sheldon.

But it might soon go away. 

Maple Dale is one of thousands of dams constructed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, beginning in the mid-20th century, for the purposes of flood control. 

In 2018, five similar dams in the region failed during a massive rainstorm that caused property damage in the tens of millions of dollars. A study determined that several other dams in the watersheds hit hardest by the flood, including Maple Dale, were also vulnerable to failure but would be too expensive to replace. 

As a result, local officials are voting on whether to dismantle the dams by cutting large notches in them, allowing the water to flow again, in a process called decommissioning. Experts say it could be the most dams ever decommissioned in a single county in the U.S. 

And it could be a harbinger for other communities.

Although the county may be the first to take on a project of this size, it’s unlikely to be the last. Dams across the country are aging, and also facing pressures from urban sprawl and intensifying floods wrought by climate change. The price tag to fix what’s broken, though, is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, meaning dam owners could face hard questions about what to do with them. 

In Viroqua, it’s also leaving the people who own property below the dams uneasy about what comes next — including Sheldon.

“To come along and just rip a big hole out and let the water run is a mistake,” he said.

Removal plan controversial

The southwest Wisconsin dams are among nearly 12,000 that have been built under the USDA’s Watershed Programs. Generally smaller and set in rural agricultural areas, they’re mostly clustered from the center of the country eastward. Oklahoma has the most, followed by Texas, Iowa and Missouri. 

The idea for the watershed program dams arose during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Because there was little vegetation left on the landscape to soak up rain when it fell, there were several severe floods during that time, prompting federal agencies to look for a way to control the water. 

To get the dams built, the Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a contract with a local sponsor, such as a county. NRCS covered all the construction costs and helped the sponsor with inspections and repairs. In return, the sponsor maintained the dam for a certain number of years — under most contracts, 50 — to ensure taxpayers got their money’s worth out of the project. 

Since many of the dams were built in the 1960s and 1970s, said Steve Becker, Wisconsin’s state conservation engineer for NRCS, their contracts are now up. 

“We pretty much told the counties, ‘You have full autonomy to do whatever you want with those dams,” Becker said. “You can maintain, you can rehab, you can repair. It doesn’t really matter. We’re out.” 

When the Wisconsin dams failed, however, local officials enlisted the help of NRCS to figure out what to do. The agency launched a study of all the dams in the watersheds and found that, while they’d controlled flooding over the last few decades, they fared much worse under future modeling because of their age and projected increases in heavy rainfall. Because the cost to replace them was too steep, NRCS recommended taking them out of service, on the federal government’s dime. 

In Vernon County, home to the majority of the dams examined in the study, that plan has been controversial. 

Garrick Olerud is treasurer of the Snowflake Ski Club in Westby, which is below three of the dams that are set to be dismantled. The club has had to spend “a lot” of money over the past decade fixing flood damage to the ski jump and the golf course on the property, Olerud said — and that’s with the protection of the dams. 

“When you remove those dams, I guess I have big, big concerns about the long-term effects it’ll have,” he said. “I’m not an expert, but I don’t believe that the course or the ski jump will continue to … have the financial means to build back after stuff gets washed away.” 

To others, leaving the dams in place risks a bigger catastrophe if more of them fail during a storm.

“When (the dams) work, they work, but when they go out, it’s 10 times worse than a regular flood,” Frank Easterday, a member of the Vernon County board, said during an Aug. 15 meeting. 

At the meeting, the board voted to accept federal funding from NRCS so the agency can move forward with decommissioning. Nearby La Crosse and Monroe counties, which have a handful of such dams between them, have followed suit. 

Aging dams, climate threats make for ‘perfect storm’

Threats to America’s dam infrastructure were thrust into the spotlight in June when the Rapidan dam in southern Minnesota partially failed, pushed to its limit by days of historic flooding across the upper Midwest. 

In the American Society of Civil Engineers’ latest Infrastructure Report Card, released in 2021, the group gave the nations’ more than 91,000 dams a “D.” That’s largely because of their age—the average age of a dam in the U.S. is over 60 years old, said Del Shannon, the lead author of that section of the report card. 

As residential development has sprawled nationally, some dams that once posed little risk to human life if they failed are now a bigger threat. 

On top of that, climate change is leaving question marks about how dams will perform under new weather conditions. Precipitation, for example, increased 5 to 15% across the Midwest during 1992 to 2021, compared with the 1901-1960 average. That’s largely driven by intensifying rainfalls.  

To date, almost 6,600 of the watershed program dams will have completed their contracts, according to an NRCS spokesperson. In the next five years, that number will rise to 7,383. That means many more places like Vernon County will have decisions to make about how — and whether — to keep them up. 

In 2015, now-retired NRCS watershed program engineer Larry Caldwell warned in a memo that a “perfect storm” of problems with watershed dams could put people and property at risk. He outlined seven such problems: these dams are everywhere across the nation, downstream landscapes have filled in since they were constructed, they’re getting old, climate change is bringing more extreme weather, limited funds for repairs, loss of institutional knowledge about the dams and the fact that the failure of smaller dams can — and have — killed people. 

“Any one condition is cause for concern. The presence of two or three would be cause for alarm,” Caldwell wrote. “But all seven are occurring simultaneously which will eventually create a crisis for many communities.” 

Properly maintained dams can continue doing their job “well beyond” their contracts, the NRCS spokesperson said. Still, understanding the proper path forward for an individual dam can be challenging because all dams are unique, Shannon said. 

What’s more, there’s not a good understanding of how long these kinds of dams can function, a gap Shannon called “astonishing and embarrassing.” He’ll take part in a forthcoming study that seeks to give dam owners broad information about when dam parts start to show wear — like crumbling concrete spillways or corroded metal gates — and when to think about repairing, replacing or charting another course. 

High price tag for dam rehab means other solutions may be necessary

Another hurdle in the quest for better dam infrastructure: cost. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials, which works to improve dam safety through professional development and lobbying, estimates the cost to fix non-federal dams, which make up the vast majority of the nation’s dams, at $157.5 billion. 

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in 2021, provided somewhat of a shot in the arm: $3 billion was earmarked for dam safety, including $118 million for the rehabilitation of the USDA watershed program dams. An NRCS spokesperson said that money paid for 118 dam projects across the nation, many clustered in the southern and eastern U.S.

Shannon said he views it as a down payment, but more funding is obviously needed. The southwest Wisconsin dams, for example, would cost a few million dollars apiece to replace, Becker estimated — racking up close to $100 million just for one small region. 

“What can we afford to do? We can afford to notch them out,” Becker said. “If some big benefactor came in and said, ‘23 dams times $3.5 million? We can help pay for that,’ we’d re-evaluate.” 

Although recent federal funding will move the needle, looking at the total cost can be depressing, said Lori Spragens, executive director of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials — particularly when remembering that dams are aging every day. She called it a “one step forward, two steps back” situation, and said there’s an urgent need to make progress. 

“I think we are going to see more dams under stress, or even failing,” Spragens said. “It’s not really fun to look at in the future.” 

Amid these challenges, there’s growing interest in natural solutions to reduce the impact of floodwaters in place of built infrastructure. Moving away from areas that flood often and using farming practices that help the land hold on to water, instead of allowing it to run downstream, could help. 

The community in Vernon County recognizes that. 

“With or without the dams, flooding is going to be a huge challenge in this community,” county conservationist Ben Wojahn told the board during the Aug. 15 meeting. “Decommissioning these dams is not the end … keeping the dams would not be the end.” 

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

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A new collection of historic documents highlights the unique history of the “Driftless region,” an area that encompasses southwestern Wisconsin, southeastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa, and a tiny sliver of northwestern Illinois. This beautiful hilly area is geologically unique, as it was untouched by glaciers that descended from Canada tens of thousands of years ago.

The University of Wisconsin-La Crosse library has amassed an informal holding place for photos, maps, journals and field notes telling the story of the upper Mississippi River river and the Driftless region that surrounds it. It made sense for the university, which isn’t far from the banks of the river. 

In 1920, a local newspaper publisher turned politician donated his private library to the university, containing numerous historical works that detailed the development of the upper Mississippi River valley.

After a while, digital collections librarian David Mindel thought there needed to be a way to tie the materials together — to harness their potential for a scientific, economic, cultural and historical accounting of one of America’s great rivers and raise the library’s profile for soliciting more.

In July, library staff announced the Driftless River Initiative, meant to do just that.

“I think the potential is endless in terms of where researchers can take this, and as a librarian, I’m able to see the overlap and interconnectedness of it all,” Mindel said. “That’s really why I think it’s important to label this as something more than just random collections — to try to make it into something more.”

Collections include steamboat photos, river maps, birding journals

The initiative simply gives a name to something that’s been in the works much longer. Building on the 1920 donation, the library has received thousands of historical photos of steamboats, which played a major role in the development of the Mississippi and its tributaries. 

Some of the photos are the oldest of the river-related materials housed at the library, Mindel estimated, dating back to the 1850s.

The collections also include research from Stanley Trimble, professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, who spent decades studying agriculture and sedimentation in Wisconsin’s slice of the Driftless region, and from the late Stafford Happ, who was publishing papers in the 1940s about the area’s soil.

There are river maps from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, some of which show how it flowed before the implementation of the locks and dams in the 1930s, which forever changed the look of the upper Mississippi. There are maps and charts from the beginnings of the Upper Mississippi River National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, established in 1924.

Mindel is working on adding more recent works into the collection, such as Stories from the Flood, a project from the Driftless Writing Center to preserve the experiences of residents who lived through catastrophic flooding in southwestern Wisconsin in 2018.

Mindel said his favorite part is looking through photo negatives that the library acquires, which have to be processed before the images on them can be seen. He described it as “treasure-hunting.”

He also enjoys the personal journals and field notes that are part of these collections, including from Fred Lesher, a former UW-La Crosse professor and avid birder. The library has 13 volumes of Lesher’s handwritten birding notes.

“You’re getting unfiltered thoughts,” Mindel said. “It’s not a published paper or some other formal document. It’s a person’s own personal thinking.”

There are plenty of formal documents, too, including publications and surveys from the Upper Mississippi River Conservation Committee dating back to the 1940s. Materials were donated as recently as last week by the Mississippi River Regional Planning Commission, a Wisconsin group that works on economic development along the river.

Historical artifacts could provide a deeper connection to the Mississippi River

The presentation of the Driftless River Initiative is still in nascent stages — people who want to view steamboat photos or other collections can visit the library or look online, Mindel said, but there’s no formal exhibit.

That’s because many of the materials still need to be digitized. Realistically, Mindel said, that will take a long time. He’s currently searching for grants that could help the library purchase larger scanners.

It’s a crucial part of the process, though.

“If (it’s) not known that we’re just sitting on these things, essentially, they don’t exist,” Mindel said.

Once people know what’s there, he’s hopeful it will open the door for researchers to make connections between subjects and create new things. Looking at the pre-lock and dam river maps, he said, he imagined an app people could download as they cruise the river to see what it once looked like.

Mindel said he thinks the collections will keep growing naturally over time. The library already has a reputation for steamboats and river science, he said, and having the formal initiative could turn it into even more of a hub.

Ultimately, he hopes it will more deeply connect residents to the stories of the river that shapes their region, which in Wisconsin can sometimes get overshadowed by the Great Lakes.

“The nation itself has this long connection to the Mississippi River … you could define things by the Mississippi, in terms of your place. Sometimes it’s forgotten, that significance,” Mindel said. “What I’m hoping is this elevates the river a bit as this major freshwater resource, and the way that folks in the Driftless area identify with the river and with the area in general.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

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ELBA, Minn. — Jeff Broberg’s well sits inside a wooden shed not too far from a field he rented about a decade ago to a local farmer. 

One day, Broberg discovered the farmer was fertilizing with hog manure. In doing so, combined with the commercial fertilizer he was already using, the farmer was almost doubling the amount of nitrogen on the field in hopes of producing a better corn yield. 

Not all of that nitrogen went to the corn. Some of it seeped into the groundwater and was pumped through the well that supplied the water Broberg drank in the form of nitrate, which is made when nitrogen and oxygen combine. 

It’s an alarming local impact of a persistent problem that washes far downstream through the Mississippi River watershed, eventually ending up in the Gulf of Mexico, where nitrates are one cause of a low-oxygen “dead zone” that chokes off plant and aquatic life

In Minnesota, Broberg’s well water tested at 22 parts per million nitrate – more than double what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says is the safe limit for the contaminant. 

Broberg, a retired geologist who’s now a clean water advocate, had his well tested when he first bought the house in 1986. For the first decade he lived there, it hovered close to 10 parts per million nitrate, the EPA’s limit. When it started to test above that, he began to haul water from a friend’s house in a nearby town. 

Finally, he installed a system that reduced nitrate levels in the water he drank, a system that protected him after the incident with the farmer. 

But he has questions about what he might have been exposed to when he was drinking the water straight out of the tap years before.

Last year, he was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. Drinking water with elevated nitrate has been linked in some research to kidney dysfunction. Though it’s nearly impossible to determine the exact cause of such ailments because other lifestyle factors can play a part, he can’t help but wonder what role the water played. 

Broberg’s home in rural Winona County, Minnesota, is about a dozen miles as the crow flies from the Mississippi River. The nitrate polluting his well water links him directly to the other end of the river, and the dead zone that blooms there every summer.

This year officials have forecast that the area will be about 5,827 square miles – larger than average, roughly the size of Connecticut and more than twice the target size that a task force of scientists and government officials aims to see by 2035. 

Progress on decreasing it has been slow-going, despite billions of dollars in investment. 

Still, a 2023 public opinion survey conducted by the University of Missouri – in partnership with the Ag & Water Desk, the journalism collaborative that reported this series – showed only about 25% of Mississippi basin residents understood the causes of the dead zone.

But upstream communities are starting to recognize there are costs closer to home. 

Broberg and hydrologist Paul Wotzka are both board members of the Minnesota Well Owners Organization, which last April was among several groups to ask the EPA to intervene in their region’s nitrate contamination problem. In a response last fall, the EPA said “further actions” were needed to protect human health and directed Minnesota state agencies to develop a plan to test drinking water and give residents alternative water sources as soon as possible. 

Anything that cuts nutrient pollution upstream will eventually help the Gulf, Wotzka said. And issues like these are personal enough to make people sit up and pay attention. 

“That’s why we focus on the kitchen tap. Everybody’s got one, everybody should be concerned,” Wotzka said. “You’ve got to get people to focus on improving the water resource that is closest to them.” 

Polluted water becomes a public health problem 

The spotlight was on southeast Minnesota when residents approached the EPA for help with their nitrate-contaminated wells. But it’s a much more widespread – and costly – problem. 

Other Midwest states with economies driven by agriculture, such as Wisconsin, Iowa and Nebraska, have pockets of nitrate pollution where soils are sensitive and porous, allowing the contaminant to easily seep into groundwater. Iowa environmental groups filed a similar petition to the EPA in April. 

Private well owners are particularly vulnerable because they are responsible for testing and treating their own water. But it can be burdensome for public water utilities, too.

In Iowa, Des Moines Water Works has spent millions of dollars on a nitrate removal facility to keep nitrates from nearby rivers out of the city’s water supply – a cost that’s ultimately passed on to ratepayers. The small town of Utica, Minnesota is also spending $2 million to drill a deeper well in hopes of keeping contamination out. 

Then there’s the cost to human health. The most well-known health problem linked to consuming nitrate in water is blue baby syndrome, which occurs when a lack of oxygen in the blood turns infants’ skin blue. The link was first reported in 1945, and hundreds of cases were reported in babies drinking formula prepared with well water. 

A few decades later, the EPA set the maximum contaminant level for nitrate at 10 mg/L – lower than what made the babies sick – and thanks to the public health campaign that communicated that limit, the condition is now relatively rare.   

But there’s growing attention to the health impacts that consuming water high in nitrate can have on older children and adults, including colorectal cancer, thyroid disease and birth defects. A 2018 review of studies of such impacts found that risk of some of those illnesses increased even when the nitrate in people’s drinking water was below the maximum contaminant level. 

In Nebraska, where the pediatric cancer rate is among the highest in the nation, University of Nebraska Medical Center research found that areas of the state with higher rates of pediatric cancer also have higher nitrate levels. 

Researchers urge that more studies are needed to firmly draw a line between drinking water nitrate and these conditions. Broberg and Wotzka said they limit their discussions about health impacts when speaking with others because they’re not doctors. But in areas like theirs with high nitrate levels, people do wonder if there’s a connection.

The health issues associated with nitrate are common in his community, Broberg said. His neighbors ask, “Aren’t there clusters of this going on?”

Going to the EPA turned up the volume on Minnesota’s nitrate issue, said Carly Griffith, water program director for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, the group that filed Minnesota’s petition to the EPA. 

“My hope is that it’s not always necessary to reach a crisis level to see this kind of coordinated action,” Griffith said.

Excess nutrients cause toxic blooms 

It’s not just drinking water that’s in jeopardy. Surface water filled with too much nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers can kill fish – a common problem in southeast Minnesota streams – and create conditions ripe for toxic algae blooms. 

These blooms, which typically occur in warm, nutrient-rich water, contain toxins that can sicken people and animals that come into contact with them. In 2021, federal health officials reported 117 human illnesses and more than 2,700 animal illnesses linked to the blooms.

Even people who don’t get sick may find themselves affected. Toxic blooms, as well as bacteria like E. coli that can get into the water by way of manure or sewage, close beaches across the country each year. 

It’s an annoyance for would-be swimmers, but also a detriment to local tourism economies. 

In Madison, Wisconsin, the state’s capital city and its flagship university sit on a chain of five lakes surrounded by farmland. The lakes have historically struggled with excess phosphorus from farms, yielding an unpleasant, soupy green sight some summer days. 

“If it’s a gorgeous day, there’s nothing else like it in the entire world,” James Tye, founder and executive director of the Clean Lakes Alliance, said of visiting the university’s lakeside terrace.

But on days when algae blooms proliferate, he said, conditions can be downright dangerous if those blooms are releasing toxins into the water that people are recreating in. 

Tye said once water exits the Madison lakes, it takes only 40 days to travel the length of the Mississippi River and end up in the Gulf.

But his organization doesn’t spend a ton of time talking about that. He knows people can only pay attention to so much. 

“Phosphorus is the thing that the community has decided we can make the quickest and biggest change to,” he said.  

Efforts to clean up the lakes have been moderately successful, but they now face new climate threats. A shorter winter season means there’s more time for algae blooms to form, and more severe rains make it easier for excess phosphorus to wash downstream. 

Local issues could be the key to upstream solutions

There have been some efforts over the years to directly connect people at the upper end of the Mississippi River with people near the Gulf. 

Wotzka participated in a conference that hosted prominent Gulf of Mexico dead zone researcher Nancy Rabalais in the mid-1990s. She spoke to Minnesotans about how the nutrient pollution coming from Midwest farms was destroying coastal shrimpers’ and fishers’ livelihoods. 

Still, “to draw that connection to the Gulf is just extremely hard to do,” Wotzka said. “But when you’re talking about contaminated drinking water, it’s a different story.” 

Joe Ailts, an agronomist in northwest Wisconsin, understands that all too well. His own water has to be treated for high nitrate, something that’s on his mind while he works with farmers who are adopting practices that will slow runoff. 

For people who are generally concerned about water quality, the Gulf’s dead zone might be a motivator, Ailts said. 

But for others, it’s the hyperlocal issues that will resonate. 

“The mindset that’ll take someone from no action to action is seeing it personally,” he said.

This story is part of the series Farm to Trouble from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting collaborative.

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MINNESOTA CITY, Minn. — Sabrina Chandler spent much of her life on the other end of the Mississippi River.

Growing up on the Gulf Coast near New Orleans, where levees wall the river off, she had to work to see it. Near the delta, the river is a big, scary, powerful thing. People fear it.

Now the manager of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, Chandler recounted those days as she drove to one of her favorite places. She pulled up to Verchota Landing, where the river opened up in front of her, expansive and calm. She pointed to a pile of felled trees — a beaver’s calling card — then to an arc of pelicans flying overhead, and a muskrat poking its head above water before disappearing under the surface.

“There’s not really a bad view anywhere,” she said.

The Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge protects more than 240,000 acres of floodplain along the river from Wabasha, Minnesota to Rock Island, Illinois, including much of Wisconsin’s geographically unique Driftless Region. It’s one of 571 such refuges across the U.S., which garner less love from the public than the country’s national parks but have an equally important mission. It’s the land system managed first and foremost for wildlife conservation.

This month, the upper Mississippi refuge is celebrating its 100th anniversary. Dozens of events this summer are aimed at getting people out to explore its beauty and unique value.

Much of the rest of the Mississippi River floodplain has been developed to serve human needs. Levees in Iowa and Illinois restrain the river as it courses through high-production farmland, and further south, it’s lined by fossil fuel and petrochemical plants.

It was the specter of such development more than a century ago that led one impassioned fisherman, Will Dilg – a Chicagoan who co-founded the Izaak Walton League – on a crusade to protect the stretch of river he loved most.

On June 7, 1924, he got his wish: the creation of a refuge on the upper Mississippi, which to this day provides hundreds of miles of river habitat to fish and wildlife and gives people the opportunity to enjoy it for free.

But the refuge faces new threats. Habitat degradation, made worse by climate change, is threatening this protected place as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is tasked with taking care of it, has fewer resources to do so. It means the next 100 years of the refuge’s lifetime will be critical.

“We’re thankful for conservation advocates like Will Dilg, who were just stubborn enough to make it happen,” Chandler said. “We are hoping for a new generation of those kinds of folks.”

Dilg makes a stand to stop the ‘drainage crime of the century’

In July 1923, subscribers to the monthly magazine of the newly formed Izaak Walton League found a fiery plea from Dilg in its pages.

“The drainage crime of a century is about to be committed and you can stop it,” he wrote. “Will you do it?”

Dilg was talking about a plan to drain Winneshiek Bottoms, a tranquil riverside channel on the Wisconsin-Iowa border. It was part of a larger push by developers who were frustrated by farmland near the river getting flooded, and who proposed building levees to hold the river in.

Dilg had every reason to ignore the plight of the Mississippi: His young son had drowned in it during a family vacation to a houseboat near Winona. Instead, he sang the upper river’s praises as paradise on earth for animals, birds, and most importantly, fish and the fishers who loved to catch them.

He implored the League’s members, already tens of thousands strong, to write to then-President Warren G. Harding to stop the drainage of Winneshiek Bottoms and ask Congress to purchase the land along the river from Wabasha to Rock Island so that it could become “forever a National Preserve.”

“‘Let George do it’ won’t do this time,” Dilg wrote, referring to the idea of foisting responsibility for solving a problem onto someone else. “You have got to do it yourself OR IT WON’T BE DONE.”

Dilg meant business, and his words galvanized an impressive cadre of sportsmen across the country, as well as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Eleven months later, Congress passed the Upper Mississippi River Wild Life and Fish Refuge Act, which authorized the acquisition of land for the refuge.

Steve Marking, a river historian and guest performer for American Cruise Lines on its Mississippi River cruises, said Dilg’s name should be remembered along with other great environmental conservationists like John Muir and Aldo Leopold.

“He sold our modern conservation movement to the American public,” said Marking, who this year debuted “A Visit from Will Dilg,” a documentary and live performance about Dilg’s work that he scripted, filmed and starred in. “Nobody else did that kind of sales job and got them to buy it.”

Dilg’s leadership style was divisive, and a few years later, he was ousted from his role as president of the Izaak Walton League. But the legacy he left with the creation of the refuge and the love he inspired for the land remains.

Refuge protections facilitate connection to the river

For Marking, the refuge was the playground he grew up on, one he was taught to cherish by his father, who worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service.

After leaving for college and a singing career out east, he’d take a canoe out on the water each time he returned, noticing how quickly his stress melted away.

“So many people I know moved away for a decade, two, three, and always find their way back to the Mississippi River,” Marking said. “It’s in your blood.”

He’s not alone.

Barry Allen, senior regional director for Ducks Unlimited in southwest Wisconsin, hunted on the refuge with his father near their home in Wabasha all through high school. His favorite part is searching through bays and backwaters for groups of birds, often a wide variety species, undiscovered by other hunters.

Allen said it’s “unbelievable” how many duck hunters use the refuge. On last year’s opening weekend, he arrived at his previously scouted spot at 2 a.m. to find the parking lot completely full.

“Having access to a place like the river and the (refuge) has shaped me, and I know it’s shaped …hundreds of thousands of people,” he said.

Although it’s difficult to say exactly what this corridor of the river might have looked like had it been leveed off for farmland, it’s fairly certain that access — for both people and wildlife — would be restricted.

Today, the refuge is designated as a Wetland of International Importance and a Globally Important Bird Area. Such large tracts of relatively undisturbed habitat are increasingly hard to find, to the detriment of birds that need them, said Nat Miller, senior director of conservation for the National Audubon Society’s Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi Flyway regions.

Cutting off the river from its natural floodplain and constraining its flow through narrower levees also makes it rise higher and flow faster during floods, which can cause worse flooding downstream. For a long time, the answer to that was to build levees with higher walls, although some communities are now pursuing levee setbacks to make room for the river instead.

Communities along the refuge don’t have those decisions to make. And they have the luxury of being able to launch a boat or take a walk directly by the water.

It’s something that Brenda Kelly, Mississippi River wildlife biologist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, takes full advantage of.

She takes her hunting dogs, Harper and Reno (both named after places on the river near De Soto, where she lives) swimming in the Mississippi often. She fishes, kayaks, hunts and hikes. She also leads a paddling field trip annually to entice people to the area who may have never explored it before.

Once people know about it, “They’ll be sure to be right back,” Kelly said.

And that’s important, she believes, even on a river like the Mississippi, which is so massive that people might think it simply takes care of itself.

“The answer is, no, it doesn’t,” she said. “It needs the refuge. It needs those protections in place.”

A shrinking refuge staff tackles urgent challenges

The effects of degrading habitat and climate change are showing themselves on the refuge, and funding to address them hasn’t kept up.

Dying floodplain forests have become one of the refuge staff’s chief concerns these days, Chandler said. More severe and longer-lasting flooding, caused by a warmer, wetter atmosphere as well as land use changes that make water run off the landscape faster, is killing off trees that would otherwise perform important ecological functions.

The trees on the refuge are managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which owns more than a third of refuge lands that it acquired for the creation of the locks and dams nearly a century ago. The Corps, the Fish and Wildlife Service and an Audubon forest ecologist work together to take care of the trees and control the new problems that can arise when they die off, like the spread of invasive reed canary grass.

The river’s backwater channels, a favored spot for many fish species, are also getting shallower as sediment from upstream washes downriver and settles. That’s also causing problems in the main channel, where the Corps must dredge large amounts of sand to allow shipping traffic to pass through, but in the backwaters, it’s hurting vegetation growth and driving out fish.

Kelly worries about an influx of road salt, the presence of PFAS – the so-called “forever chemicals” that threaten human health – in the water, and the possibility of train accidents and pollution as a result of more frequent flooding.

“As great as this resource is, it’s not like we marked it with the refuge” and shielded it forever, she said.

The urgency to fix these problems comes at a time when the national wildlife refuge system is seeing budget cuts and staffing shortfalls. The system has lost over 800 permanent positions since the 2011 budget year, according to the National Wildlife Refuge Association, and a 2019 High Country News story reported the system’s budget had decreased nearly 18% since 2010 when accounting for inflation.

Chandler said on the upper Mississippi refuge, she’s lost about a third of her staff since she took over as manager.

“There are a lot of things where we just have to say, ‘You know what, this is not a priority,’ and we have to let those things go,” she said.

Inspiring the next generation of refuge protectors

Still, there are opportunities ahead that could lighten the load. The refuge received $10 million from the Inflation Reduction Act to build up resiliency to the impacts of climate change and restore its ecosystems.

Chandler said she’s also focused on acquiring more privately owned land for the refuge. In the last 10 years, close to 8,000 acres have been donated, or acquired by, the refuge.

The staff also relies more heavily today on the work of volunteers – something that could get easier as its 100th anniversary has prompted interest in new chapters of the Izaak Walton League.

During the premiere performances of Marking’s “A Visit from Will Dilg” in La Crosse earlier this year, more than 50 people said they’d be interested in forming a chapter to tackle environmental challenges they’re concerned about, said Jodi Labs, the League’s national president, who’s based in Wisconsin.

That investment in the future resonates with Brian Vigue, freshwater policy director for Audubon Great Lakes. A member of the Oneida Nation, Vigue sees parallels between the creation of the refuge and the Seventh Generation principle that many tribes hold, in which today’s choices should be made to benefit those who will live seven generations later, and people should live in the world as if they are borrowing it from future generations.

Though the refuge isn’t quite seven generations old, “can you imagine if somebody hadn’t had the foresight to plan ahead?” Vigue said. “Who knows what we would have there right now.”

What’s there now is beauty that astounds him. On a fall trip up the Great River Road with his wife, they stopped in the refuge, admiring the colors and the ducks that still hung around before flying south. They climbed a bluff to look down at the Mississippi, a view that “puts you in your place,” he said, thinking about how long the river has wound its way through this part of the world.

Like Kelly, Vigue has been struck by the thought that the river is so big that it feels impossible that humans would have any impact on it. But its struggles have proven that untrue.

That makes the rallying effort behind the creation of the refuge — long before communication through social media — all the more remarkable.

“If people look at how that actually all took place, it really could be a great template for modern conservation advocacy,” Labs said. “Just think what we could accomplish today.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The Izaak Walton League, Ducks Unlimited and Audubon Society, all sources in this story, also receive Walton funding.

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Spring migration is underway along the Mississippi River flyway, making the river and its floodplain a hotspot for waterfowl and soon-to-arrive songbirds.

The Mississippi plays a critical role guiding these birds across the country and providing them habitat to rest. Here’s everything you need to know about this important flyway — and when and where to see the birds amid their long journey.

What is the Mississippi River flyway, and which birds use it?

The Mississippi Flyway is a migration route along the Mississippi, Missouri and lower Ohio rivers that birds take each spring and fall to make their way between their breeding grounds in Canada and their winter homes in the Gulf of Mexico and Central and South America.

It’s one of four flyways in the U.S. The others are the Central Flyway, the Pacific Flyway and the Atlantic Flyway.

More than 325 bird species use the Mississippi Flyway each year, including sparrows, warblers, owls, ducks, plovers, cranes, chickadees and many more. It’s estimated that roughly 40% of waterfowl and shorebirds in North America use the flyway.

Where do they come from, and where are they going?

Waterfowl typically winter in the southern and southeastern U.S., about as far south as the Gulf of Mexico, said Dale Gentry, director of conservation for Audubon’s Minnesota, Iowa and Missouri region.

When they migrate along the river, they’re headed to the Prairie Pothole region of Canada, western Minnesota and the Dakotas. Some species, including wood ducks, buffleheads and mergansers, will stay in the forested areas of Wisconsin and Minnesota to nest in tree cavities.

Many songbird species, by contrast, make much farther journeys, flying from Central and South America. They migrate at night and pay close attention to atmospheric pressure to decide when to travel, Gentry said, preferring pressure systems with no storms or clouds. Once in the air, they can fly around 200 miles per night before stopping to rest and recharge for a few days.

It’s “every birder’s dream” to be in the right spot when a massive flock of colorful songbirds arrive, exhausted, to hang out for a bit, Gentry said.

Why do birds like the Mississippi River?

Just like many of us humans have memorized landmarks that chart the route between our homes and certain familiar places, birds use the Mississippi River as a guide to help them travel south to north and vice versa, Gentry said.

Birds that migrate elsewhere use mountain ranges or the coasts as guides, but in the middle of the country, there’s no better visual marker than the Mississippi, he said.

It also comes with a valuable added bonus: reliable habitat to stop and rest in. Despite the massive changes the river floodplain has undergone as cities have developed around it, there’s still water and a ribbon of forest alongside it in many places that make it an attractive place to rest and refuel.

Although all species seem to appreciate it, there are some birds that are particularly attached. The prothonotary warbler, for example — a bright yellow songbird named for the yellow robes worn by papal clerks in the Roman Catholic church — enjoy big, old forests surrounded by floodwaters, Gentry said. In southeast Minnesota and southwest Wisconsin they’re abundant along the Mississippi, but birders elsewhere in the state will rarely see them.

How could climate change, habitat loss and light pollution affect birds on their journey?

The crucial habitat the flyway offers is facing a series of threats. At Audubon, Gentry said, there’s concern about what scientists call “phenological mismatch.” In other words, birds are genetically cued to leave the south when the weather warms, and they arrive in the north when insects emerge and trees bud.

But climate change is throwing off the timing of those events.

As winters and springs warm up, data is showing birds are arriving a little sooner than they were historically. The idea that the early bird gets the worm holds true here — birds want to arrive at their final destination as early as possible to claim the best breeding grounds. The danger is that the weather could fluctuate and a spring cold snap could kill off tree buds and insects that the birds need to eat, eventually causing them to die.

The river’s floodplain forests are also struggling. Between 1891 and 1989, the upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers lost nearly half of their floodplain forest cover due to urban and agricultural land use, as well as changes to the way the water flowed after locks and dams were installed in the 1930s.

Those losses have accelerated in the last few decades, both because of climate change and land use changes. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which can produce more intense rainfall. Longer-lasting floods, including a massive one in 2019 in which the river was above flood stage for more than 100 days, are killing off the trees. 

Light pollution has also been a threat to birds, particularly during their migration journeys. Birds orient in part by the moon and the stars, Gentry said, making them attracted to light. Bright urban environments can draw them in, and it can be deadly: nearly 1,000 birds died one night during migration last fall when they flew into a Chicago building on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Audubon urges people to turn out all unnecessary lights during spring and fall migration, and even think about dimming necessary ones during times of peak bird traffic.

When and where is the best place to see them?

Spring migration starts in earnest in April as waterfowl move north, Gentry said, arriving on the river by the tens of thousands.

Songbirds start to arrive in early to mid-May, sometimes in groups so large they can be tracked on weather radar. The best time to catch them is in the early morning, from sunrise until about 10 a.m., when they’re moving around and actively feeding.

During this time frame, there’s not really a bad spot along the upper Mississippi river to see a bunch of birds, Gentry said, particularly public lands. He suggested Wyalusing State Park near Prairie du Chien, Hixon Forest and Goose Island in the La Crosse area, and anywhere on the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, which protects thousands of acres of river floodplain between Wabasha, Minnesota, and Rock Island, Illinois.

Of course, there’ll be another opportunity for bird watching when fall migration rolls around — typically the flashier of the two, Gentry said, because the birds that came in the spring have had babies, meaning almost twice as many birds make the journey back south.

But he prefers getting out in the spring. The birds are in their breeding plumage and are often singing to attract a mate.

“It brings hope, thinking about the journey those birds made,” Gentry said, “and how much they overcame to be there.”This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. Sign up to republish stories like this one for free.

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