Down the Mississippi River, an altered wetland landscape faces new threats

Published in collaboration with the Mississippi River Ag & Water Desk as part of their series “Down the Drain: A watershed moment for America’s greatest wetlands.”

Before the American expansion west in the 19th century, the Mississippi River was a landscape of wetlands. Its northern tributaries coursed through prairie potholes and peatland bogs in the upper Midwest. Massive marshes and wet prairies sprawled from Ohio through Indiana, Illinois and Iowa. The confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers marked the beginning of a swamp forest dominated by cypress, nearly 24 million acres that spread out into Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. The river split into a web of distributaries in Louisiana, creating a bayou and coastal marsh region of unparalleled biological productivity bordering the Gulf of Mexico.