The Kansas River

The Kansas River, known locally as The Kaw flows 173 miles from Junction City to Kansas City. It is one of the longest prairie streams in the world and it provides for hundreds of thousands of Kansans who drink its water, harness its power, dredge its sands, float its currents and harvest its water for fields. But for decades, people have also controlled how the Kansas river flows.

After the devastating Great Flood of 1951, the Kansas River was transformed with a network of levees, dams and reservoirs to prevent future natural disasters. The management plan at that time focused only on the human needs for the river and not the health of the river itself. That plan was never updated.

Now, seventy years later, the way reservoirs are managed and water is released from dams along the Kansas River is being revisited. The Kaw was added to the Sustainable Rivers Program, a nation-wide partnership between The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“We first had to determine how species in the Kansas River rely on the natural flows of the river, and then how those flows have been disrupted by dams,” says Heidi Mehl, director of water and agriculture programs for The Nature Conservancy. “We reviewed all the scientific literature from before the dams were built to understand how conditions in the river would vary. We could then show how the river would have flowed after a wet year or a drought, when it would be dry and how these changing conditions affected the health of the river ecosystem.”

Variability is key to restoring a more natural flow to the Kansas River, and it impacts every aspect of river health from fish and insect life cycles to sedimentation and water quality. In 2020, the project team—which includes representatives from state and federal agencies along with other non-profit organizations—reviewed what changes to dam and reservoir operations could be made while still meeting all the demands of the communities that rely on the river. The team’s formal recommendations to establish environmental flows must go through many layers of review. Some of the recommendations are simple: a mid-summer pulse of water to help specific fish species. Others are more complicated and will take the cooperation of a diverse group of stakeholders to implement.

The first of these recommendations was put into action in May and June 2024. A large amount of water was discharged from the Tuttle Creek Lake reservoir into the Kansas River to mimic the high water levels and fast currents that would naturally occur after spring rains. That provided the cue for fish like the blue sucker that it was time to get moving and spawn.