Download or read book The Atchafalaya River Basin written by Bryan P. Piazza and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive, one-volume reference, Nature Conservancy scientist Bryan P. Piazza poses five key questions: —What is the Atchafalaya River Basin? —Why is it important? —How have its hydrology and natural habitats been managed? —What is its current state? —How do we ensure its survival? For more than five centuries, the Atchafalaya River Basin has captured the flow of the Mississippi River, becoming its main distributary as it reaches the Gulf of Mexico in south Louisiana. This dynamic environment, comprising almost a million acres of the lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley and Mississippi River Deltaic Plain, is perhaps best known for its expansive swamp environments dominated by baldcypress, water tupelo, and alligators. But the Atchafalaya River Basin contains a wide range of habitats and one of the highest levels of biodiversity on the North American continent. Piazza has compiled and synthesized the body of scientific knowledge for the Atchafalaya River Basin, documenting the ecological state of the basin and providing a baseline of understanding. His research provides a crucial resource for future planning. He evaluates some common themes that have emerged from the research and identifies important scientific questions that remain unexplored.

Download or read book The Atchafalaya River Basin written by Bryan P. Piazza and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive, one-volume reference, Nature Conservancy scientist Bryan P. Piazza poses five key questions: —What is the Atchafalaya River Basin? —Why is it important? —How have its hydrology and natural habitats been managed? —What is its current state? —How do we ensure its survival? For more than five centuries, the Atchafalaya River Basin has captured the flow of the Mississippi River, becoming its main distributary as it reaches the Gulf of Mexico in south Louisiana. This dynamic environment, comprising almost a million acres of the lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley and Mississippi River Deltaic Plain, is perhaps best known for its expansive swamp environments dominated by baldcypress, water tupelo, and alligators. But the Atchafalaya River Basin contains a wide range of habitats and one of the highest levels of biodiversity on the North American continent. Piazza has compiled and synthesized the body of scientific knowledge for the Atchafalaya River Basin, documenting the ecological state of the basin and providing a baseline of understanding. His research provides a crucial resource for future planning. He evaluates some common themes that have emerged from the research and identifies important scientific questions that remain unexplored.

Download or read book Atchafalaya Houseboat written by Gwen Roland and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-04-24 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1970s, two idealistic young people—Gwen Carpenter Roland and Calvin Voisin—decided to leave civilization and re-create the vanished simple life of their great-grandparents in the heart of Louisiana's million-acre Atchafalaya River Basin Swamp. Armed with a box of crayons and a book called How to Build Your Home in the Woods, they drew up plans to recycle a slave-built structure into a houseboat. Without power tools or building experience they constructed a floating dwelling complete with a brick fireplace. Towed deep into the sleepy waters of Bloody Bayou, it was their home for eight years. This is the tale of the not-so-simple life they made together—days spent fishing, trading, making wine, growing food, and growing up—told by Gwen with grace, economy, and eloquence. Not long after they took up swamp living, Gwen and Calvin met a young photographer named C. C. Lockwood, who shared their "back to the earth" values. His photographs of the couple going about their daily routine were published in National Geographic magazine, bringing them unexpected fame. More than a quarter of a century later, after Gwen and Calvin had long since parted, one of Lockwood's photos of them appeared in a National Geographic collector's edition entitled 100 Best Pictures Unpublished—and kindled the interest of a new generation. With quiet wisdom, Gwen recounts her eight-year voyage of discovery—about swamp life, wildlife, and herself. A keen observer of both the natural world and the ways of human beings, she transports readers to an unfamiliar and exotic place.

Download or read book The Control of Nature written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

Download or read book Atchafalaya Basin Floodway System written by and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Environmental Base and Management Study Atchafalaya Basin Louisiana written by Sherwood M. Gagliano and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Designing the Bayous written by Martin Reuss and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2004-06-02 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River Basin is one of the most dynamic and critical environments in the country. It sustains the nation’s last cypress-tupelo wetland and provides a habitat for many species of animals. Endowed with natural gas and oil fields, the basin also supports a large commercial fisheries industry. Perhaps most crucial, it remains a primary component of the plan to control the Mississippi River and relieve flooding in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and other communities in the lower river valley. The continuing health of the basin is a reflection not of nature, but of the work of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. With levee building and clearing in the nineteenth century and damming, dredging, and floodway construction in the twentieth, the basin was converted from a vast forested swamp into a designer wetland, where human aspirations and nature maintained a precarious equilibrium. Originally published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers primarily for internal distribution, this environmental and political history of the Atchafalaya Basin is an unflinching account of the transformation of an area that has endured perhaps more human manipulation than any other natural environment in the nation. Martin Reuss provides a new preface to bring us up-to-date on the state of the basin, which remains both an engineering contrivance and natural wonder.

Download or read book A Comparison of Three Flooding Regimes Atchafalaya Basin Louisiana written by Johannes L. Van Beek and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Hydraulics of the Atchafalaya Basin Main Channel System written by Johannes L. Van Beek and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book ATCHAFALAYA BASIN FLOODWAY LOUISIANA FLOOD CONTROL MISSISSIPPI RIVER AND TRIBUTARIES DESIGN MEMORANDUM NO 16 ATCHAFALAYA RIVER LA NAVIGATION DESIGN MEMORANDUM NO 1 GENERAL DESIGN written by United States. Army. Corps of Engineers. New Orleans District and published by . This book was released on 1955 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Atchafalaya River Basin written by David Sebok and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Water Resources Development in Louisiana written by and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Water Quality Management Plan for the Atchafalaya River Basin written by Domingue, Szabo & Associates and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Atchafalaya River Basin written by Charles M. Hubbs and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Water Resources Development by the U S Army Corps of Engineers in Louisiana written by and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Geology of Backswamp Deposits in the Atchafalaya Basin Louisiana written by E. L. Krinitzsky and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Restoration and Water Management in the Atchafalaya River Basin Louisiana written by Justin P. Kozak and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental restoration in aquatic systems requires innovative approaches that combine scientific understanding, socioeconomic demands, and local stakeholder values into decisions. However, changing approaches to water management to address these requirements is difficult because of scientific and socioeconomic uncertainty and institutional barriers that can prevent implementation of alternative water management approaches. Current restoration efforts in the Atchafalaya River Basin (ARB) of Louisiana are faced with this challenge. Water management in the ARB has evolved from strong federal control to establish the ARB as a primary floodway of the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project to a state and federal collaboration to accommodate fish and wildlife resource promotion, recreational opportunities, and economic development. While management policy has expanded to include a growing number of stakeholders, the decision-making process has not kept pace. Current conflicts among many local stakeholder groups, due in part to their lack of involvement in the decision-making process, impede restoration efforts. The absence of a long-term collective vision for the ARB by both local stakeholder groups and numerous management agencies further confounds these efforts. Here, I propose a process to apply a structured decision making framework, a values-based approach that explicitly defines objectives, to promote stakeholder-driven restoration efforts in the ARB and to better prepare for and manage long-term environmental issues. The goals of this approach are: 1) to create a process founded on stakeholder values and supported by rigorous scientific assessment to meet management agency mandates and 2) to establish a structure for restoration planning in the ARB that incorporates current and future non-governmental stakeholders into a transparent decision-making process. Similar frameworks have been successful in other river basins and the structure of current restoration efforts in the ARB is well-suited to adopt a values-focused management framework. Next, I use flow-ecology relationships to evaluate ecosystem service trade-offs and complementarities in the ARB to assess the potential impacts of water management decisions. Flow-ecology relationships were used to explore complementary and trade-off relationships among 12 ecosystem services and related variables in the ARB. Results from Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration were reduced to four management-relevant hydrologic variables using principal components analysis. Multiple regression was used to determine flow-ecology relationships and Pearson correlation coefficients, along with regression results, were used to determine complementary and trade-off relationships among ecosystem services and related variables that were induced by flow. Seven ecosystem service variables had significant flow-ecology relationships for at least one hydrologic variable (R 2 =0.19-0.64). River transportation and blue crab (Callinectes sapidus ) landings exhibited a complementary relationship mediated by flow; whereas transportation and crawfish landings, crawfish landings and crappie (Pomoxis spp.) abundance, and blue crab landings and blue catfish (Ictalurus furcatus ) abundance exhibited trade-off relationships. Other trade-off and complementary relationships among ecosystem services and related variables, however, were not related to flow. These results give insight into potential conflicts among stakeholders, can reduce the dimensions of management decisions, and provide initial hypotheses for experimental flow modifications. The final study in this dissertation proposes an environmental flow prescription for the highly altered ARB. The development of the ARB into a floodway has contributed to hydrologic changes basin-wide that have altered the river-floodplain interface threatening important ecosystems, notably the expansive baldcypress-water tupelo swamp forests. Analysis of the current flow regime reveals a 12-92% increase in mean monthly discharge over the past 80+ years, but a 24-43% decrease in mean monthly stage in large portions of the basin. Current restoration efforts only address the spatial distribution of water in local areas of the basin; however the timing, frequency, magnitude, and duration of ecologically important high and low flows are determined at the basin-wide scale by the daily implementation of a federal flow mandate that limits available water management options. We used current hydrologic conditions and established flow-ecology relationships from the literature to develop an environmental flow prescription for the ARB that provides basin-wide flow targets to complement ongoing restoration efforts. The result is an adaptive flow regime that strives to balance important flow-ecology relationships within a decision space limited by a federal flow mandate. We found that lengthening the implementation of the current flow mandate to monthly or quarterly time scales has high potential for success in meeting both the flow mandate and important flow-ecology relationships.