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The Mississippi River Delta was once a vast, unbroken landscape of bottomland forest covering 24 million acres across the Southeast, making it the largest expanse of forested wetlands in North America.
But today only about 5 million forested acres remain, mostly in small, degraded patches scattered across six states. Over the last two centuries, the river valley’s fertile soils have been transformed into fields of cotton, rice and soybeans — and the rivers have been harnessed for flood control, irrigation and navigation.
The Nature Conservancy has been working for the last 25 years with partners and private landowners in the Lower Mississippi River Valley to restore functioning blocks of bottomland hardwood forest and reestablish wildlife corridors between them — efforts that have resulted in the reforesting of more than 250,000 acres of land.
Forested Wetlands Are Crucial for Nature and People
Why is this reforesting important? Because forested wetlands not only provide habitat for wildlife — but many environmental services to people as well, including water-quality maintenance, carbon sequestration and floodwater retention.
“Animals like the Louisiana black bear need large, contiguous areas of bottomland forest habitat to thrive,” says Lee Moore, director of the Conservancy’s Lower Mississippi River Program.
“If we can provide this habitat by working with landowners and other state, federal and nonprofit partners to restore blocks of forested wetlands and connect them together through forested corridors, then it’s very possible this rare subspecies of bear could be removed from the threatened and endangered species list some day.”
The Lower Mississippi Valley is also the largest wintering ground in the world for mallard ducks. Duck, deer and turkey hunting — along with bird-watching and fishing — are an important part of the regional economy.
Restoring functioning blocks of hardwood forest will provide important breeding, nesting and migratory stopover habitat for birds, while also providing the clean water and air required by both people and wildlife.
High-Priority Lands That Often Become National Treasures
The Conservancy has focused on identifying high-priority lands in the Lower Mississippi River valley, working with landowners to acquire those lands and then collaborating with partners to ensure the lands’ long-term conservation.
Most of the lands were agriculturally marginal, and many have been sold to the federal government as additions to the national forest, park and refuge systems.
In many instances, it was the Conservancy’s land that was used to start national wildlife refuges, including the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in Arkansas and the Cat Island NWR in Louisiana.
Getting the Job Done Requires New Approaches
But in order to work at the scale needed to have a major conservation impact in a 24-million-acre ecoregion, the Conservancy has added new approaches to traditional protection practices like acquisition.
The single most significant new tool to assist in the reforestation of marginal agricultural lands in recent years has been the USDA’s Wetlands Reserve Program, with more than 600,000 acres enrolled since 1992 in the four lower valley states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.
The Conservancy, along with other nonprofit groups such as Ducks Unlimited, has been working with Congress, federal regulators, state technical committees and landowners to ensure that federal funds go to the highest priority sites for the benefit of waterfowl and the full suite of species that represent the biodiversity of the Lower Mississippi Valley.
Valuing the Services These Forests Give Us
And over the last five years, the Conservancy has been working with government agencies, academia and private corporations to explore additional new tools to support reforestation.
One of these is the idea of determining the value of the “ecosystem services” provided by a restored bottomland hardwood forest. Ecosystem services are those things like clean water and flood control that nature provides for free.
In Louisiana, the Conservancy has facilitated numerous transactions over the last three years between private corporations and willing landowners that pay landowners for planting trees on their property.
In turn, the private corporation or investor gets the “credit” for the carbon that will be sequestered by the trees.
Similarly, the Conservancy is working with partners in all four lower valley states to determine quantitative estimates of other ecosystem services provided by restored forests, including reduced nutrients and sediments in waterways, benefits to biodiversity and recreation, floodwater attenuation and groundwater recharge.
“Ultimately, we want to take this information about the value of the many services provided by restored wetlands and use it to help create a market, similar to the carbon market, that pays landowners for restoring the bottomland hardwood forests that once blanketed the Mississippi River Delta and provide so many benefits to people and nature,” says Moore.
Photo credits (top to bottom, left to right): © Mark Godfrey/TNC (Fall color along Bayou DeView, Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, Arkansas); © Erika Nortemann/TNC (Alligator in Louisiana)
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