Keynote Presentation - Fisheries Management from the Great Lakes to the Gulf: Sea Grant's Role in Research, Outreach and Building Partnerships Along the Mississippi River

The survival of human settlement on the Mississippi River Delta (MRD) is arguably coupled to a shifting mass balance between sediments delivered and land built by the Mississippi River compared to water occupied by the Gulf of Mexico. We will describe how the coastal basins of the MRD provide insights into how different river management strategies change the patterns of how deltaic ecosystems provide services to human settlement. A measure of how coastal deltaic basins respond to river management decisions can be tracked by the relative land and water area changes that have occurred over the last 50 years under conditions of sediment delivery, sea level rise, and subsidence. The landward migration of Gulf of Mexico and corresponding changes in coastal conditions indicate that these linear migration patterns reflect nonlinear risks such as coastal flooding. Research is showing how nitrogen biogeochemical processes change with successional development in soils as wetland net productivity augments organic matter content. These dynamic and active delta growing regions of MRD provide insights to benefits of ecosystem restoration.  These ideas will be discussed along with a ‘delta outreach’ program to describe the multiple benefits of river management in the depositional environments of the Mississippi River.