Great Rivers Partnership - LMR Sand Ridge Lands

Sand Ridge Lands

Located within the Mississippi River’s alluvial plain in adjoining Ripley County in southeastern Missouri and Clay County in northeastern Arkansas is an unusual woodland. It is relatively flat but undulating, with trees rooted in fields of low dunes, the ridges of which enclose numerous sand ponds. In wet seasons, the ponds fill with precipitation and groundwater seeping into them from adjacent dunes. Scientific evidence indicates that the dunes were deposited by winds some 20,000 years ago.

The Nature Conservancy’s Lower Mississippi River Program has designated a priority conservation site of approximately 16,000 acres in the area, in part because it shelters pondberry, a deciduous shrub listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as endangered, and other rare species such as the endemic sedge Carex abscondita, corkwood, mole salamander and western mud snake.

Strategies and Progress

Some efforts have been made to conserve the Sand Ridge Lands site, which lies within a predominantly agricultural area. Protected lands include the Missouri Department of Conservation’s 202-acre Sand Ponds Conservation Area; The Nature Conservancy’s 250-acre Nancy B. Altvater Pondberry Preserve, also in Missouri; and the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission’s 140-acre Stateline Sand Ponds Natural Area.

Environmental stresses on the site include habitat fragmentation and destruction, land leveling, altered groundwater and surface water regimes, and water-quality issues such as excessive sedimentation and contaminants. The Conservancy ’s strategies for minimizing those stresses include continuing to build solid scientific knowledge of the site on which to base conservation measures, working with appropriate governmental agencies to achieve water flows that will sustain the site’s habitats, and cooperating with existing partners and building new partnerships that will result in collaborative approaches to conserving the site and its resources.

What's to Gain?

The Sand Ridge Lands’ sandy base, bottomland water cycle of seasonal flooding and drying, and southern climate have combined to create a rare, perhaps unique, natural community. Preservation of that exceptional community will result in the conservation of a number of rare species of plants and animals, including the endangered pondberry.

Pondberry

LMR Program

Priority Sites

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The Nature Conservancy and its partners work at sites along the entire length of the Mississippi River, from its headwaters in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.