A $10 million investment will fund seven projects aimed at making national wildlife refuges along the headwaters of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers more resilient to climate change, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced earlier this month.
The projects, which span all five states bordering the headwaters of the Mississippi, will emphasize nature-based solutions – in other words, working with the river ecosystem rather than trying to control it – to reduce the impacts of some of the river’s biggest problems, such as flooding and drought. There are 11 national wildlife refuges along the two rivers, the largest of which is the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge.
The funding comes from the Inflation Reduction Act. Some of it was rolled out last year to support projects on state lands, including in Wisconsin.
The upper rivers of the Mississippi and Illinois are feeling the effects of a warmer, wetter world, and human-built infrastructure built decades ago, such as the lock system and levees, cannot keep up. In particular, an almost unprecedented amount of water has flowed through the rivers over the past decade, killing trees, damaging fish habitat and threatening to breach dikes meant to contain them.
These new projects are intended to help land managers think about these climate threats and adapt to what’s happening now, said Tim Miller, who manages the La Crosse District of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge.
Here’s what you need to know about what they’ll be tackling.
Floodplain forests are a priority
More than $1 million will go toward the Building Resilience in America’s Big River Forests project, and another half million will go toward restoring Missouri’s hardwood forests.
Soil forests, also called floodplain forests, are located along major rivers. As their name indicates, they flood seasonally when the river overflows. But along the headwaters of the Mississippi, more water flows through the river and prolonged flooding has left these trees with more water than they can handle, killing hundreds of people.
More: What you need to know about floodplain forests, a struggling ecosystem on the Mississippi River
More: A new technique could help save the Mississippi River’s floodplain forests: raising the forest floor
Work is underway to save them, but this money will allow the Fish and Wildlife Service to expand the reach of that work to all 11 national wildlife refuges along the river in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, Miller said.
Staff will curtail invasive plant species that have moved into areas where larger trees have died and plant tree species better suited to the current wetter conditions.
The funds will also help staff labor-intensive projects like these at shelters with very few employees, Miller said. The national wildlife refuge system has suffered from chronic understaffing over the past decade.
Other projects will make room for the river
Some river engineering structures will receive a facelift or even a total overhaul to cope with the high water. That includes the Guttenberg Ponds in Clayton County, Iowa, where a levee protecting a wetland from the river’s main channel has deteriorated over time and repairs have been costly. The project will allow the degradation and turn the area behind it into floodplain forest, Miller said.
“Instead of fighting the river with the levees we’ve had, we let the river naturally deteriorate over time,” he said. “It’s a beautiful way to look at it.”
Other engineering changes include replacing or raising the water control structures, which regulate the river’s flow, so they can hold more water, relieving stress on the river, Miller said.
The Wisconsin project focused on fish habitat
One of the funded projects is specific to Wisconsin: the restoration of Sam Gordy’s Slough in Buffalo County. Floods and high flows have brought more sediment into the backwater channel, making the area shallower and less suitable for fishing, effectively cutting it off from the main river channel.
More: Climate change is endangering the inland waters of the upper Mississippi River. Now nature needs human help.
The project will reconnect the impoundment channel to the main channel by dredging and install a sediment diverter so sediment cannot continue to build up, Miller said.
Work on most projects will begin this year, he said, with the exception of the Guttenberg Ponds project.
Madeline Heim is a US Army reporter who writes about environmental issues in the Mississippi River Basin and throughout Wisconsin. Contact her at (920) 996-7266 or mheim@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Mississippi River wildlife refuge projects will combat climate change
