Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Missouri
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

Large river floodplains provide a multitude of important, and frequently at odds, ecosystem services. Furthermore, tools that address the spatiotemporal patterns of inundation are needed to improve large river floodplain management. We developed a model of 200 river miles of the Middle Mississippi River that generates a spatial database that collapses 85 years of daily river hydrodynamics and hydroclimatic variability into seasonality, duration, frequency, and magnitude of floodplain inundation under existing land use conditions. These results will be used to predict the effects of the removing flood protection levees on floodplain inundation patterns and will help the US Fish and Wildlife Service and other partners to develop floodplain management scenarios that provide ecosystems services while balancing other needs such as flood control.