Atchafalaya River Conference Held
On January 10-11, 2008, a two day conference on the Atchafalaya River was held in Baton Rouge. Over 150 faculty members from Louisiana universities, representatives of various state and federal agencies and interested individuals attended the conference. The purpose of the meeting was to review what people know about the river and its surrounding environment, to report on recent and ongoing research related to the river, and to identify information gaps that have a negative impact on decision making by land and water managers and government policy makers. The program included 30 presentations on research being conducted in relation to the Atchafalaya River and the surrounding basin
The Atchafalaya River is a 140 mile long distributary channel of the MIssissippi River. The delta at the Gulf end of the river is the only actively building delta in the Gulf of Mexico. The Atchafalaya transports 100% of the Red River sediment and 25% of the Mississippi River sediment. Because the gates at the Old River Control structure which joins the Mississippi River and the Atchafalaya River do not trap sediment in the way that other locks and dams do, the Atchafalaya River delta is allowed to continue a building process from the deposit of sediment. Over time not only is the river delta building but the Atchafalaya basin itself is also naturally filling in and evolving from open water to cypress swamp to bottomland forest.
The delta building process that continues for now in the Atchafalaya is the same process that has ceased to function in the Mississippi River delta. This failure of this process has been the principal cause of the loss of coastal wetlands in Louisiana which, of course, is the subject of this blog. The study of the ongoing delta building process in the Atchafalaya river and basin is thus worthwhile to better understanding events in the Mississippi River delta.
Erich.
