The State of Louisiana is leading an integrated wetland restoration and flood risk reduction program in the Mississippi River Delta. East of New Orleans, Biloxi Marsh, a ~1700 km2 peninsula jutting 60 km north toward the State of Mississippi is one o...
Climate change forcings are having significant impacts in coastal Louisiana today and increasingly affect the future of New Orleans, a deltaic city mostly below sea level, which depends on levee and pumps to protect from a host of water-related threa...
The Mississippi River Delta has been continuously losing land since the 1930s due to several factors, chief of which is the reduced sediment supply. A few recent studies have estimated individual components of short-term sediment transport, i.e., bed...
The Mississippi River Delta Plain has undergone substantial land loss caused by subsidence, relative sea-level rise, and loss of connectivity to the Mississippi River. Many restoration projects rely on diversions from the Mississippi River, but uncer...
With the decline of operational river gauges monitoring sediments, a viable means of quantifying sediment transport is needed. In this study, we address this issue by applying relationships between hydraulic geometry of river channels, water discharg...
Nutrient and carbon transport from the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico have been investigated intensively. However, little is known about the direct human contribution of carbon from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) to this large river, a...
The Mississippi River System is of great ecological and economic importance, making it crucial to monitor contaminants within it. While nutrient pollution is well studied, there are little data on microplastics (MPs) in the Mississippi River System (...
Sediment cores were collected from a mudflow lobe (80 m water depth) offshore of the Mississippi River’s Southwest Pass in 2017 to better understand the sedimentology near the lobe entraining the SS Virginia shipwreck (sunk by a German U-boat i...
This book contains 14 articles selected from a special issue on the assessment of resilience and sustainability of the Mississippi River Delta as a coupled natural-human system. This effort is supported in part by a U. S. National Science Foundation...
The formation of channel bars has been recognized as the most significant sediment response to the highly trained Mississippi River (MR). However, no quantitative study exists on the dynamics of emerged channel bars and associated sediment accumulati...
Using the Mississippi River as a tool for restoration has been a key element of restoration planning in Louisiana for decades. The results of allowing river water and sediment back into the coastal system are manifested in a number of places in prese...
Fish age and growth analyses can be used to infer spawning success, recruitment, and population age structure. Understanding these dynamics is important when assessing the impacts of invasive species, such as bighead carp, Hypophthalmichthys nobilis,...
Rapid land loss in the Mississippi River Delta Plain has led to intensive efforts by state and federal agencies for finding solutions in coastal land restoration in the past decade. One of the proposed solutions includes diversion of the Mississippi...
The Mississippi River (MR) discharges on average 474 km3 of water annually into the Northern Gulf of Mexico (NGOM) with a large quantity of carbon, playing a vital role in the ecosystem’s food chain and water quality. In this study, we analyzed...
Estuarine navigation channels have long been recognized as conduits for saltwater intrusion into coastal wetlands. Salt flux decomposition and time series measurements of velocity and salinity were used to examine salt flux components and drivers of...
Adult bigheaded carps Hypophthalmichthys spp. have never been observed in the diets of native fishes in the Mississippi River Basin. In addition, blue catfish Ictalurus furcatus diet preference and foraging behavior have never been studied in the pre...
A pressing question facing the Mississippi River Delta (MRD), like many deltaic communities around the world, is: Will the system be sustainable in the future given the threats of sea level rise, land loss, natural disasters, and depleting natural re...
Situated throughout the southeastern United States within the Laurentian craton are occurrences of various aged deposits (Late Proterozoic to Early Paleogene) that contain volcanics spanning from lamprophyres to carbonatites and basalts to rhyolites....
This paper presents an assessment of community resilience to coastal hazards in the Lower Mississippi River Basin (LMRB) region in southeastern Louisiana. The assessment was conducted at the census block group scale. The specific purpose of this stud...
Carbon dioxide (CO2) outgassing from river surface waters is an important component of the global carbon cycle currently not well constrained. To test the hypothesis that riverine partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) and CO2 outgassing rates differ between...
Many Mississippi River Delta studies have shown recent declines in fluvial sediment load from the river and associated land loss. In contrast, recent sedimentary processes on the subaqueous delta are less documented. To help address this knowledge ga...
Risks from flooding and poor water quality are evident at a range of spatial scales and climate change will exacerbate these risks in the future. Natural infrastructure (NI), consisting of structural or perennial vegetation, measures that provide mul...
Biological processes of rivers are strongly influenced by concentration and fluxes of nitrogen (N) levels. In order to restrain eutrophication, which is typically caused by urbanisation and agricultural expansion, nitrogen levels must be carefully co...
To minimize the eutrophication pressure along the Gulf of Mexico or reduce the size of the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico, it is important to understand the underlying temporal and spatial variations and correlations in excess nutrient loads, whi...
The lowermost Mississippi River (LMR) is one of the largest deltaic systems in North America and one of the heavily human-manipulated fluvial river systems. Historic hydrographic surveys from the mid-1900s to the early 2010s were used to document the...
The Mississippi River Delta Front (MRDF) is a subaqueous apron of rapidly deposited and weakly consolidated sediment extending from the subaerial portions of the Birdsfoot Delta of the Mississippi River, long characterized by mass-wasting sediment tr...
This article describes the opinions and perceptions of farmers on water management tools that conserve groundwater and on alternative sources of water for irrigation. The analysis is based on a survey of producers (N=466) across the Lower Mississippi...
Hurricanes are one of the most devastating earth surface processes. In 2020 and 2021, Hurricanes Zeta and Ida pounded the Mississippi River Delta in two consecutive years, devastated South Louisiana, and raised tremendous concerns for scientists and...
With the high demand for freshwater and its vital role in sustaining multiple ecosystem services, it is important to quantify and evaluate freshwater provisioning for various services (e.g., drinking, fisheries, recreation). Research on ecosystem ser...
Growing human demands are placing significant pressure on groundwater resources, causing declines in many regions. Identifying areas where groundwater levels are declining due to human activities is essential for effective resource management. This s...
The estuaries of the Mississippi River Delta are among the most productive coastal ecosystems in the world and have attracted human fishing communities for centuries. Beginning in the early 20th century, the oil and gas industry also emerged as a pow...
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Drought is one of the most widespread extreme climate events with a potential to alter freshwater availability and related ecosystem services. Given the interconnectedness between freshwater availability and many ecosystem services, including food pr...
Predicting nutrient loads is essential to understanding and managing one of the environmental issues faced by the northern Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone, which poses a severe threat to the Gulf’s healthy ecosystem and economy. The development of...
The backwater lowland habitats of large rivers, like the Mississippi River in North America, present complex and often inaccessible environments for traditional capture-based fish biodiversity sampling. Our knowledge of the assemblages of the fishes...
Driven by the need to expand urban/industrial complexes, and/or mitigate anticipated environmental impacts (e.g., tropical storms), many coastal countries have long implemented large-scale land reclamation initiatives. Some areas, like coastal Louisi...
The upcoming Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission will measure rivers wider than 50–100 m using a 21-day orbit, providing river reach derived discharges that can inform applications like flood forecasting and large-scale hydrologic model...
Phragmites australis is a globally distributed wetland plant. At the mouth of the Mississippi River, P. australis on natural levees of the network of distributary channels appears to increase the flow in the deep draft navigation channel, which, in t...
The Louisiana shoreline is rapidly retreating as a result of factors such as sea-level rise and land subsidence. The northern Gulf of Mexico coast is also a hotspot for hurricane landfalls, and several major storms have impacted this region in the pa...
This paper analyses five major transitions in watershed management in the Lower Mississippi River from the early 19th century to the present. A conceptual framework is developed for analysing the role of visions, agency, and niches in water managemen...
Macrophyte (aquatic plant) recovery has occurred in rivers worldwide, but assemblage patterns and habitat requirements are generally not well understood. We examined patterns of species composition and macrophyte abundance in the Upper Mississippi Ri...
River discharges are critical for understanding hydrologic and ecological systems, yet in situ data are limited in many regions of the world. While approximating river discharge using satellite-derived water surface characteristics is possible, the k...
The Mississippi Delta region has worse population health outcomes, including higher overall cardiovascular and infant mortality rates. Water quality has yet to be considered as a factor in these health disparities. The objective of this paper is to d...
Accurate crop yield prediction and modeling are essential for ensuring food security, optimizing resource allocation, and guiding policy decisions in agriculture, ultimately benefiting society at large. With the increasing threat of weather change, i...
The cross-shelf advection of coastal waters into the deep Gulf of Mexico is important for the transport of nutrients or potential pollutants. Twenty years of ocean color satellite imagery document such cross-shelf transport events via three export pa...
Intense conversion of bottomland hardwood forests to rice and soybeans in the Mississippi River Valley of Arkansas has restricted the remaining forest to isolated fragments. Habitat fragmentation has proven to be detrimental to population sustainabil...
We measured benthic fluxes of dissolved nutrients in subtidal sediments and intertidal soils associated with river-pulse events from Mississippi River via the operation of a river diversion structure at Caernarvon, LA. Experiments measuring benthic f...
River confluences are important nodes for downstream sediment transport and geomorphological development. Previous studies have established the knowledge that under natural conditions, river confluence zones experience channel scour followed with mid...
Despite increasing interest in monitoring the global water cycle, the availability of in situ gauging and discharge time series is decreasing. However, this lack of ground data can partly be compensated for by using remote sensing techniques to obser...
High inflows of freshwater from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers into the northern Gulf of Mexico during spring contribute to strong physical and biogeochemical gradients which, in turn, influence phytoplankton community composition across the...
Deltaic landscapes go through cycles of birth, growth, decline, and death governed by intertwined geological, biological, and ecological processes. In this study, we tracked deltaic lobes in the Balize Mississippi River Delta, Louisiana, USA, over 28...
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