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Jason Skold
Jason Skold. Photo © David Radler

 

Unchannelized river bank
Unchannelized river bank. Photo courtesy Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.

  

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Jason Skold, The Nature Conservancy’s Missouri River program manager, is among nine Nebraskans selected to serve on the new Missouri River Recovery Implementation Committee. MRRIC is an advisory group, created by Congress, to provide guidance to the Army Corps of Engineers on matters relating to Missouri River flow and ecosystem restoration. 

Not long ago, the Missouri River was a disorderly tangle of shallow channels, dissecting a wide floodplain of forests, prairies and wetlands. The river system—a mosaic of islands, sandbars, and mudflats—sustained flocks of migrating birds, reptiles and amphibians, mammals and fish. 

During the 20th century the mighty, messy Missouri was seen a resource that needed to be harnessed and tamed for human enterprise. Stability was considered paramount to meet the navigation, flood prevention, water supply, and water quality needs of homes and cities. The upper reaches were dammed for irrigation and hydropower. Levees and dikes were constructed on the lower river, changing it into a single channel—narrow, deep and suitable for navigation. 

These changes transformed the character of the river. Spring floods, which once helped to create and connect habitat and furnish reproductive cues to many species, stopped. Croplands replaced floodplain wetlands, forests, and prairies, slashing plant diversity. 

Most mammal, fish, and bird species are in decline as a result.  

While the river will never return to its past, the time has come for a better future. The Conservancy’s Missouri River program is seizing upon, and helping to create, unprecedented opportunities to make real progress on this system. 

Skold’s participation will consist of providing input on how to spend the estimated $85 million available next year to improve habitat for endangered species, how to time spring water releases from dams and how to best focus restoration efforts like sandbar and slough creation. 

The Conservancy joins representatives of the governors of Nebraska, Iowa, six other basin states, 14 federal agencies, and many of the basin’s 28 Native American tribes. 

Bringing different interests together to find solutions is one strength the Conservancy is bringing to MRRIC, along with conservation planning expertise. Beginning in late 2005, the Conservancy convened a diverse group of people from academia, federal and state agencies, and private conservation organizations to work through conservation planning for the river’s critical issues. The Lower Missouri River Ecosystem Conservation Action Plan attempts to address the challenges of competing interests on the Missouri River.