Corn & Shrimp: Mississippi Basin Landscape Design for Wildlife, Water Quality and Agriculture

According to water quality assessments, Midwest states within the Mississippi River Basin (MRB) contribute the greatest nutrient load to the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf Hypoxia Initiative, spearheaded by seven Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs), is an objective-driven process for targeting delivery of wildlife conservation practices that benefit wildlife, water quality and agricultural productivity (“what to do”). The Precision Conservation Blueprint v1.0 provides publicly accessible online spatial analysis tools to map, evaluate, and select the most strategic places to implement these actions (“where to do it”). This process is intended to be complementary to related efforts, such as the Hypoxia Task Force, Mississippi River Basin Initiative, and state nutrient reduction strategies -- but with an added emphasis on the ecological, economic and social values of strategically positioned wildlife habitat. Stakeholders are examining this set of high impact conservation practices, web-based spatial analysis tools, and research products to: 1) identify immediate opportunities to target investments in conservation delivery across the MRB; and 2) recommend next steps for research and model integration. Outcomes will be a well-defined set of actions to overcome program/policy barriers, guide user-designed tool interfaces, propose demonstration sites for emerging practices, and develop basin-level cross-sector monitoring strategies.