Mississippi River refuges get $10 million for nature-based solutions to climate change

A $10 million investment will fund seven projects aimed at making national wildlife refuge lands along the upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers more resilient to climate change, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced earlier this month.

The projects, which span all five states that border the upper Mississippi, will emphasize nature-based solutions — in other words, working with the river ecosystem instead of trying to control it — to blunt the impacts of some of the river's major problems, like flooding and drought. There are 11 national wildlife refuges along the two rivers, the largest of which is the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge.

The funding comes from the Inflation Reduction Act. Part of it was rolled out last year to support projects on state-owned lands, including in Wisconsin.

The upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers are seeing the consequences of a warmer, wetter world, and the human-engineered infrastructure built decades ago, like the lock-and-dam system and levees, isn't able to keep up. In particular, an almost unprecedented amount of water flowed through the rivers over the last decade, killing trees, degrading fish habitat and threatening to breach levees meant to constrain them.

These new projects are meant to help land managers think through those climate threats and adapt to what's happening now, said Tim Miller, who manages the La Crosse District of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge.

Here's what to know about what they'll tackle.

Floodplain forests are a priority

More than $1 million will be dedicated to the project, "Building Resilience in America's Big River Forests," and an additional half-million will go toward restoring bottomland hardwood forest in Missouri.

Bottomland forests, also called floodplain forests, are located along major rivers. As their name indicates, they flood seasonally when the river floods. But along the upper Mississippi, more water flowing through the river and longer-lasting flooding events have inundated these trees more than they can handle, causing hundreds to die.

More: What to know about floodplain forests, a struggling ecosystem on the Mississippi River

More: A new technique could help save the Mississippi River's floodplain forests: raising the forest floor

Work is ongoing to save them, but this money will allow the Fish and Wildlife Service to expand the range of that work to all 11 national wildlife refuges along the river in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, Miller said.

Staff will be curtailing invasive plant species that have moved into areas where larger trees have died and planting tree species that are better suited for today's wetter conditions.

The funds will also help staff labor-intensive projects like these on refuges that have very few employees, Miller said. The national wildlife refuge system has struggled with chronic understaffing in the past decade.

Other projects will make room for the river

Some river engineering structures will get a facelift, or even a total overhaul, to deal with high waters. That includes Guttenberg Ponds in Clayton County, Iowa, where a levee protecting a wetland area from the river's main channel has been degrading over time, repairs for which have been costly. The project will allow the degradation to happen and turn the area behind it into floodplain forest, Miller said.

"Instead of fighting the river with these levees we've had, we're allowing it to naturally degrade over time," he said. "It's kind of a neat way of looking at it."

Other engineering changes include replacing or raising the elevation of water control structures, which regulate the flow of the river, so they can hold more water, easing stress on the river, Miller said.

Wisconsin project focused on fish habitat

One of the projects funded is specific to Wisconsin: restoring Sam Gordy's Slough in Buffalo County. Floods and high flows have brought more sediment into the backwater channel, making the area shallower and less suitable for fish and effectively cutting it off from the river's main channel.

More: Climate change imperils the upper Mississippi River backwaters. Now nature needs human help.

The project will reconnect the backwater channel to the main channel by dredging, and install a sediment diverter so sediment can't keep piling up, Miller said.

Work will start on most of the projects this year, he said, with the exception of the Guttenberg Ponds project.

Madeline Heim is a Report for America corps reporter who writes about environmental issues in the Mississippi River watershed and across Wisconsin. Contact her at (920) 996-7266 or mheim@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Mississippi River wildlife refuge projects will fight climate change