Looking back at the Upper Mississippi River, moving forward

A student and I are working on finishing a project that has lingered for too many years: a careful analysis of the cumulative effects of river management on islands in the lower part of Pool 6 of the Mississippi River, near my hometown of Winona, Minnesota. There will be a MS thesis soon and hopefully a journal manuscript shortly to follow that, but for now, I’m enjoying discovering new and old research and resources on “the father of waters.”

First, check out this 17-minute silent film on the 1927 Mississippi River flood:

For more information on the film made by the Signal Corps in the 1930s, head here: http://archive.org/details/mississippi_flood_1927

Then, check out this 2012 publication from the USGS on “A Brief History and Summary of the Effects of River Engineering and Dams on the Mississippi River System and Delta.”

Finally, there’s a paper just out in Geophysical Research Letters by Frans et al. titled “Are climatic or land cover changes the dominant cause of runoff trends in the Upper Mississippi River Basin?.”

And that’s my afternoon reading sorted.