Lower Black River

The Black River begins in southeastern Missouri near Taum Sauk Mountain, the state’s highest point. Flowing generally southward, the river’s gradient, meander pattern and other characteristics change dramatically as it descends from the Ozark Plateau onto the Mississippi River’s alluvial plain near Poplar Bluff, Missouri. The lower Black River extends from that descent to its confluence with the White River at Jacksonport, Arkansas.

The lower Black is typical of floodplain rivers that provide ideal conditions for bottomland hardwood forests where unique assemblages of plants and animals flourish. In such areas, cypress-tupelo swamps provide both conservation and aesthetic values. The Nature Conservancy’s Lower Mississippi River Program has designated approximately 146,000 acres along the lower Black as a priority conservation site.

Strategies and Progress

The Lower Mississippi River Program is in its initial stages of applying a science-based process to identify specific environmental stresses within the lower Black River basin. However, such stresses are expected to include ecological factors generally occurring elsewhere within the Mississippi River’s alluvial plain, such as altered water flows, fragmented and altered habitats and reduced water quality.

What's to Gain?

Historically, the Black River sustained phenomenal aggregations of mussels. As early as 1897, it was found to contain sufficient quantities of such species to sustain a local button-manufacturing industry, which operated from 1900 until plastic buttons were developed in the 1940s. Protection and restoration of the lower Black River and its basin is expected to contribute to the conservation of globally rare mussel species.

The lower Mississippi River basin and its tributaries provide habitat that harbors more than 200 species of reptiles and amphibians.  © Byron Jorjorian

LMR Program

The LMR Alluvial Plain
Economics and the Diversity of Life

Priority Sites

Atchafalya River
Bayou Bartholomew
Big Woods
Cat Island Tunica Hills Complex
Cypress Island
Dahomey
Donaldson Point
Hatchie River
Horseshoe Lake
Lower Black River
Lower Yazoo Basin
Mingo Basin
Obion Creek and Bayou de Chien
Pine City Natural Area
Rodney
Sand Ridge Lands
St Francis National Forest
Tensas River Basin

Quick Links

Learn more about The Nature Conservancy in Missouri.

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.