In less than 10 years, three catastrophic floods ravaged northwestern Wisconsin and changed the way people think about water. 

The most severe, in July 2016, slammed Ashland with up to 10 inches of rain in less than a day — a month’s worth of rain fell in just two hours. As rivers swelled to record highs, major highways broke into pieces, and culverts washed away. It took months for roads to reopen, with more than $41 million in damage across seven counties. 

The Marengo River, which winds through forests and farmland before meeting the Bad River that flows into Lake Superior, was hit hard during these historic deluges. Centuries earlier, the upper watershed would have held onto that water, but logging and agriculture left the river disconnected from its floodplain, giving the water nowhere safe to go. 

Today, the Marengo River stands as an example of a new kind of solution. Following the record floods, state leaders invested in opening up floodplains and restoring wetlands to relieve flooding. As the need to adapt to disasters grows more urgent, the Marengo River serves as an example that there’s a cheaper way to do so: using wetlands. 

“We can’t change the weather or the patterns … but we can better prepare ourselves,” said MaryJo Gingras, Ashland County’s conservationist. 

Wetlands once provided more natural flood storage across Wisconsin and the Mississippi River Basin, soaking up water like sponges so it couldn’t rush further downstream. But about half of the country’s wetlands have been drained and filled for agriculture and development, and they continue to be destroyed, even as climate change intensifies floods.

As the federal government disposes of rules to protect wetlands, environmental advocates want to rewrite the ecosystem’s narrative to convince more people that restoration is worth it. 

Wetlands aren’t just pretty places, advocates argue, but also powerhouses that can save communities money by blunting the impact of flood disasters. A 2024 Wisconsin law geared at preventing such disasters before they happen, inspired by the wetland work in the Marengo River watershed, is going to test that theory. 

“Traditionally, the outreach has been, ‘We want to have wetlands out here because they’re good for ducks, frogs and pretty flowers,’” said Tracy Hames, executive director of the Wisconsin Wetlands Association. “What do people care about here? They care about their roads, their bridges, their culverts … how can wetlands help that?” 

Bipartisan Wisconsin bill posed wetlands as flood solution

Northern Wisconsin isn’t the only place paying the price for floods. Between 1980 and 2025, the U.S. was struck by 45 billion-dollar flood disasters, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with a cumulative price tag of nearly $206 billion. Many parts of the vast Mississippi River Basin receive up to eight inches more rain annually than they did 50 years ago, according to a 2022 analysis from Climate Central, a nonprofit organization that analyzes climate science. 

Damaging floods are now so common in the states that border the Mississippi River, including Wisconsin, that the issue can’t be ignored, said Haley Gentry, assistant director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy in New Orleans. 

“Even if you don’t agree with certain (regulations) … we absolutely have to find ways to reduce damage,” Gentry said.

Former Wisconsin state Rep. Loren Oldenburg, a Republican who served a flood-prone district in southwest Wisconsin until he lost the seat last year, was interested in how wetlands could help.

Oldenburg joined forces with Republican state Sen. Romaine Quinn, who represents northern Wisconsin and knew of the work in the Marengo River watershed. The lawmakers proposed a grant program for flood-stricken communities to better understand why and where they flood and restore wetlands in areas that need the help most. 

Jennifer Western Hauser, policy liaison at the Wisconsin Wetlands Association, met with Democratic and Republican lawmakers to advocate for the bill. She emphasized problems that might get their attention — related to transportation, emergency services, insurance, or conservation — that wetland restoration could solve. She said she got a lot of head nods as she explained that the cost of continually fixing a washed-out culvert could vanish from storing and slowing floodwaters upstream. 

“These are issues that hit all over,” she said. “It’s a relatable problem.”   

The bill passed unanimously and was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in April 2024. Evers and the Republican-controlled Legislature approved $2 million for the program in the state’s most recent budget. 

Twenty-three communities applied for the first round of grant funding, which offered two types of grants — one to help assess flood risk and another grant to help build new wetlands to reduce that risk. Eleven communities were funded, touching most corners of the state, according to Wisconsin Emergency Management, which administered the grants. 

Brian Vigue, freshwater policy director for Audubon Great Lakes, said the program shows Wisconsin residents have come a long way in how they think about wetlands since 2018, when the state government made it easier for developers to build in them. 

There’s an assumption that wetland restoration comes only at the expense of historically lucrative land uses like agriculture or industry, making it hard to gain ground, Vigue said. But when skeptics understand the possible economic benefits, it can change things. 

“When you actually find something with the return on investment and can prove that it’s providing these benefits … we were surprised at how readily people that you’d assume wouldn’t embrace a really good, proactive wetland conservation policy did,” he said. 

Private landowners need to see results

About three-quarters of the remaining wetlands in the lower 48 states are on privately owned land, including areas that were targeted for restoration in the Marengo River watershed. That means before any restoration work begins, landowners must be convinced that the work will help, not hurt them. 

For projects like this to work, landowner goals are a priority, said Kyle Magyera, local government outreach specialist at the Wisconsin Wetlands Association, because “they know their property better than anyone else.”

Farmers, for example, can be leery that beefing up wetlands will take land out of production and hurt their bottom line, Magyera said. 

In the Marengo watershed, Gingras worked with one landowner who had farmland that wasn’t being used. They created five new wetlands across 10 acres that have already decreased sediment and phosphorus runoff from entering the river. And while there hasn’t been a flood event yet, Gingras expects the water flows to be slowed substantially.

This work goes beyond restoring wetland habitat, Magyera said, it’s about reconnecting waterways. In another project, Magyera worked on a private property where floods carved a new channel in a ravine that funneled the water faster downstream. The property now has log structures that mimic beaver dams to help slow water down and reconnect these systems. 

Now that the first round of funding has been disbursed in Wisconsin’s grant program, grantees across the state are starting work on their own versions of natural flood control, like that used in Marengo. 

In Emilie Park, along the flood-prone East River in Green Bay, a project funded by the program will create 11 acres of new wetlands. That habitat will help store water and serve as an eco-park where community members can stroll through the wetland on boardwalks.

In rural Dane County, about 20 miles from the state capital, a stretch of Black Earth Creek will be reconnected to its floodplain, restoring five and a half acres of wetlands and giving the creek more room to spread out and reduce flood risk. The creek jumped its banks during a near record-breaking 2018 rainstorm, washing out two bridges and causing millions of dollars in damage. 

Voluntary program with economic angle could be of interest elsewhere 

Nature-based solutions to flooding have been gaining popularity along the Mississippi River. Wisconsin’s program could serve as a “national model” for how to use wetlands to promote natural flood resilience, Quinn wrote in a 2023 newspaper editorial supporting the bill.

Kyle Rorah, regional director of public policy for the Great Lakes/Atlantic region of Ducks Unlimited, said he’s talking about the Wisconsin grant program to lawmakers in other states in the upper Midwest, and he sees more appetite for this model than relying on the federal government to protect wetlands.  

And Vigue has found that stakeholders in industries like fishing, shipping and recreation are receptive to using wetlands as infrastructure. 

But Gentry cautioned that voluntary restoration can only go so far because it “still allows status quo development and other related patterns to continue.”

Still, as the federal government backs off of regulation, Gentry said she expects more emphasis on the economic value of wetlands to drive protection. 

Some of that is already happening. A 2024 analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that wetlands save Wisconsin and the upper Midwest nearly $23 billion a year that otherwise would be spent combating flooding. 

“Every level of government is looking at ways to reduce costs so it doesn’t increase taxes for their constituents,” Gingras said. 

John Sabo, director of the ByWater Institute at Tulane University, said as wetlands prove their economic value in reducing flood damage costs, taxpayers will see their value. 

“You have to think about (wetlands) as providing services for people,” Sabo said, “if you want to get people on the other side of the aisle behind the idea (of restoring them).” 

And although the Wisconsin grant program is small-scale for now, he said if other states bordering the Mississippi River follow its lead, it could reduce flooding across the region.

“If all upstream states start to build upstream wetlands,” he said, “that has downstream impacts.” 

This story is part of the series Down the Drain from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting collaborative based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Framing wetlands as a flooding solution won bipartisan support in Wisconsin. Could it work elsewhere? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

On a sunny spring day on a farm outside St. Louis, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin celebrated a new era for America’s wetlands. 

Flanked by farm equipment and a large American flag, Zeldin said federal rules about wetlands, long a source of frustration for people who want to drain them to grow crops or build homes, were going to relax. 

“The federal government doesn’t need to be regulating every puddle on every property everywhere in America,” he said to a group of local farmers, in a state that has already lost nearly 90% of its natural wetlands.

Zeldin said the Trump administration will once and for all solve the hotly debated question of which wetlands are federally protected — determined by the tricky term “Waters of the United States” — so farmers won’t be punished for draining them. 

That solution, Zeldin said, will come from a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared only wetlands connected to a “water of the U.S.” will be protected. That ruling, Sackett v. EPA, could remove safeguards from more than half of the nation’s remaining wetlands, which slow flooding, improve water quality and serve as important wildlife habitat. 

“There is nothing to debate anymore … we’re going to follow the Supreme Court,” Zeldin said. “It’s going to be simple.”  

But wetland protections have never been simple. 

To align with Sackett, the EPA will rewrite the definition of “Waters of the U.S.,” which spells out which water bodies and wetlands are subject to federal regulation in the Clean Water Act. The term has been caught in the crosshairs of litigation and politics for decades. Environmental advocates claim more expansive federal protections are needed to preserve the country’s natural resources, while some farmers and homebuilders argue the government is overstepping its authority to control their land. 

Zeldin’s proposed definition instructs the federal government to take a big step back from how many wetlands it protects, which conservationists have warned will further abuse a misunderstood ecosystem that has already experienced widespread destruction. 

The battle to save what’s left will fall to the states, which don’t protect wetlands equally.

The Mississippi River, of course, doesn’t heed any state rules on its long journey from Minnesota to the Gulf, and its millions of acres of wetlands control flooding and catch pollutants all along the way. An uncertain future for those wetlands means an uncertain future for the river and the people, animals and ecosystems that rely on it. 

Mississippi River wetlands are varied and vital 

Wetlands are places where land and water meet, and the Mississippi River Basin, which covers 40% of the contiguous U.S., hosts some 65 million acres of them. 

What they look like varies immensely. The prairie potholes of the upper Great Plains formed from retreating glaciers. Peatlands, most common in Minnesota, are characterized by a layer of dead plant material called peat. The swamps of the Gulf South are home to water-loving trees, like cypress and tupelo. And along the coast, freshwater from the river’s mouth and saltwater from the ocean mix in tidal marshes. 

Their common denominator is their great ecological diversity and their ability to relieve flooding, purify water, mitigate drought and provide rich wildlife habitat. Experts say in an era of increased storms, droughts and floods wrought by climate change, they’re needed now more than ever. 

During the river’s massive, long-lasting flood in 2019, Nahant Marsh, a protected wetland in Davenport, Iowa, held about a trillion gallons of water from the Mississippi that would otherwise have flooded downstream communities, according to Brian Ritter, executive director of the marsh’s education center. 

Wetland protections get political  

Despite their benefits, wetlands are in peril. Intentional destruction began in the country’s colonial days, when “drain the swamp” was a literal, not political, strategy to clear space for farmland and cities. They were also vilified, thought to harbor diseases, dangerous animals and even monsters and ghosts. 

The states that border the Mississippi River have lost at least half of the wetlands they once had, and in some states, like Illinois, Iowa and Missouri, nearly all are gone. In 2019, the latest year for which data is available, only about 116 million acres of wetlands remained in the contiguous U.S., roughly half of the pre-colonial landscape. 

In the last 50 years, societal views of wetlands changed as people learned more about their value. They also became a bipartisan issue. The 1972 Clean Water Act gave them federal protections; the 1985 Swampbuster provision in the Farm Bill penalized farmers who grew crops on converted wetlands; and former President George H.W. Bush declared “no net loss” of wetlands a national goal in the late 1980s. 

But they are still disappearing. The Mississippi River Basin lost 132,000 acres of wetlands between 2009 and 2019, according to data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That’s the equivalent of about 100,000 football fields. 

And as efforts to protect wetlands picked up, so did the issue’s political charge, launching fights over the remains of a system that was once far more vast.  

“When people heard about wetlands, it was always, ‘There’s a wetland in between where I am now and what I need to do. And the goddamn government won’t let me fix that,’” said Tracy Hames, executive director of the Wisconsin Wetlands Association.

Before Sackett, the Supreme Court tried to lay down the law in Rapanos v. United States in 2006, when a developer in Michigan wanted to fill in wetlands on his property to build a shopping center. A majority of the justices agreed that the government had overstepped, but they offered two interpretations of which wetlands get federal protections. One was more restrictive, saying only wetlands that touch a protected body of water could be regulated, and one was broader, saying any wetlands that play a key role in improving downstream water quality could be regulated. 

In the years that followed, presidential administrations have flip-flopped between the broader and more restrictive approach to governing wetlands, continually redefining “Waters of the U.S.”

Former President Joe Biden’s administration issued a broader “Waters of the U.S.” rule. But 26 states sued to block his rule from taking effect. That means that while those legal battles play out, the country is using two “Waters of the U.S.” rules to determine which wetlands are protected — Biden’s amended rule and an older version in the states that sued. 

“Waters of the U.S.” has been a “pain in the side” for farmers and ranchers, Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said in Washington March 12 after Zeldin announced his intent to revise the rule.  

“I need a rule that’s on one page, that’s sitting on the dash of my truck right beside my devotional book, and if I have a question about a ravine on my farm I can pick that one page up and read it and interpret it myself,” Duvall said. “It should be that simple.” 

And homebuilders say to fix the nation’s housing shortage, which is estimated to be at least 1.5 million housing units, developers will need wetlands. 

They’ve tried to avoid them because of the difficult permitting process over the years, said Tom Ward, vice president of legal advocacy for the National Association of Home Builders. 

“To get these 1.5 million units, we’re going to have to go back to some of those more difficult pieces of property,” Ward said. 

What’s next 

Speaking with reporters in Chesterfield, Zeldin said he’d end the ambiguity and back-and-forth with one word. 

“Sackett,” he said. “S-A-C-K-E-T-T.” 

On March 12 the EPA issued guidance that spells out what the new rule will do: Unless a wetland directly abuts another federally protected water, it will not get federal protections. 

Importantly, that guidance isn’t legally binding. Until the EPA issues its new rule, wetlands will still have Biden-era protections, meaning half of the country will be under one rule, and half will be under another. And the rule-making process contains lengthy steps that can take years — the Trump administration issued its first “Waters of the U.S.” rule in 2020 — although Zeldin has promised this one won’t take as long. 

That means the actual impacts of Sackett are yet to be understood, although some have attempted to predict them. Following the ruling, the EPA under Biden estimated that up to 63% of the nation’s remaining wetland acres could lose federal protections.  

Another way to examine the impact is by looking at the determinations the Army Corps makes when someone wants to drain or fill a wetland. After the Sackett decision, about 18% fewer of those determinations found the wetland was federally protected, according to Adam Gold, coasts and watersheds science manager for the advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund. 

Although the tool Gold created to track the change in these determinations has limitations, in part because of a small post-Sackett sample size, he said it gives a “sneak peek” at how federal protections for wetlands are waning. 

Even under a new rule that the Trump administration asserts will be more straightforward, wetlands will not have the same protections across the country because different states have different rules. Along the Mississippi River, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Tennessee and Mississippi have wetland protections that go beyond the arm of the Clean Water Act, an Ag & Water Desk analysis found. But Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky and Arkansas do not have more protective wetland laws on the books. Louisiana extends broader state protections to its coastal wetlands, but not inland ones.

In other words, it will be easier to develop wetlands for housing in Missouri, for example, than in Minnesota. That will likely cause confusion and variation across the country, said Mark Davis, founding director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy in New Orleans. “I think you’re almost guaranteed to have more confusion … we’re like everybody else. We’re reading tea leaves.”

Even the state laws are moving targets. Illinois is aiming to beef up its wetland protections, for example, while in Tennessee, lawmakers want to scale theirs back. 

Still, Zeldin intends to close the case on “Waters of the U.S.,” stepping back from decades of broad federal protections for wetlands and giving farmers and developers the certainty they’ve long asked for, with Sackett as his guide. 

But given the history of wetland regulation, certainty could still be an elusive target. 

After all, the Biden administration defended its amended “Waters of the U.S.” rule as being consistent with the Sackett ruling, too, said Abby Husselbee, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Energy and Environmental Law program. 

“To the extent that this EPA would proclaim to be the final arbiter of how Sackett applies to the definition of (Waters of the U.S.) — we see already that there are other interpretations,” Husselbee said. “I don’t necessarily know that those would go away forever.” 

Avery Martinez of KMOV, Estefania Pinto Ruiz of KWQC and Elise Plunk of the Louisiana Illuminator contributed to this story. It is part of the series Down the Drain from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting collaborative based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

A new era dawns for America’s disappearing wetlands as feds retreat from oversight is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Flood control along the Mississippi River is a central piece of a newly passed federal law — work that advocates believe is critical as the river basin sees more frequent and severe extreme weather events due to climate change. 

The Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) is passed by Congress every two years. It gives authority to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to undertake projects and studies to improve the nation’s water resources. 

Signed into law Jan. 4, this year’s package includes studies on increased flooding in the upper basin, flood mitigation measures throughout the river system, ecological restoration, and a $6 billion floodwall in Louisiana. 

The Mississippi River is managed in large part by the Army Corps, so it often features prominently in the bill, with a dual aim of making the river more suitable for shipping and restoring environmental degradation from flooding, nutrient pollution and climate change. 

Kirsten Wallace, executive director of the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association, called this year’s WRDA “a pretty special one.” She said it contained wins for many of the diverse stakeholders along the river, including shippers, environmental advocates, riverfront communities and federal and state agencies — who don’t always agree. 

Advocates lauded the law’s emphasis on nature-based solutions. In a press release, Stephanie Bailenson, policy team lead for The Nature Conservancy, said, “Since 2016, Congress has directed the corps to consider natural and nature-based solutions alongside or instead of traditional infrastructure. This latest act continues that trend.”

But all of these projects are only promised because funding doesn’t come until later, when Congress appropriates it. Many projects authorized in previous versions of the law are still unfunded, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Here’s what will affect the river in the Water Resources Development Act of 2024: 

Study of flood risk on the upper Mississippi River

The law authorizes a large-scale study of flooding on the Upper Mississippi River System, which includes the Mississippi River from its headwaters to where it meets the Ohio River at Cairo, Illinois, as well as the Illinois River and portions of some smaller tributaries.

The upper river has seen two major floods in the last few years: one in 2022 and one in 2019, which lasted for months and caused billions of dollars in damage. 

The study’s chief goal: figuring out how to reduce flood risk across the entire river system, instead of relying on municipalities to try to solve flooding problems themselves, which can sometimes have impacts downstream. North of St. Louis, for example, levees constrain the river to protect communities and valuable farmland from flooding — and some levee districts have raised those levees higher, safeguarding themselves but effectively pushing floodwaters faster downstream. 

“This plan allows more of a comprehensive way for levee districts to improve what they currently have … in a way that doesn’t put them in a position to be adversarial or just impose risk somewhere else,” Wallace said. 

She said the study will be a challenge, but that levee districts are eager for solutions as flood risks and heavier rainfall increase. 

Once the study receives funding, it will be led by the Army Corps’ St. Louis District, Wallace said. It’ll solicit input from cities, towns and ports along the river, recreators, the shipping industry and federal environmental agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey. 

Flood projects for cities from the headwaters to the delta 

Cities and towns along the river could get help for the localized effects of flooding too, thanks to several projects authorized by the law. Upstream, that includes La Crosse, Wisconsin, which will enter into an agreement with the Army Corps to study the role of the city’s levees, which were constructed around the river’s record flood in 1965. 

“We have to have an eye on maintaining what we’ve got and looking toward the future and whatever conditions the river might undergo to be prepared as best we can,” said Matthew Gallager, the city’s director of engineering and public works. “Because obviously, nature is going to win.” 

Downriver, Louisiana secured the largest project authorization within the law. To protect communities in St. Tammany Parish, a county north of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, plans to build a $5.9 billion levee and floodwall system totaling 18.5 miles in length to protect over 26,000 structures, most of which are family homes. 

The St. Tammany Flood Risk Management Project is slated to receive $3.7 billion in federal funding. The other 35% will come from non-federal sponsors, such as the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA). 

“By authorizing the St. Tammany project for construction, Congress recognizes again the national importance of Louisiana and that CPRA can work with the federal government to execute a multi-billion coastal protection project successfully,” said CPRA Chairman Gordy Dove.

The law also authorizes a federal study of the Lake Pontchartrain Storm Surge Reduction Project, a component of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan meant to protect nine parishes bordering the lake. The Army Corps will investigate whether the proposed project to reduce flood risk is in the federal interest. 

Other approved flood control projects will be funded along the lower Mississippi River and its tributaries, including the Ouachita River in Louisiana. Several counties in Mississippi will also receive funding to improve environmental infrastructure, such as water and wastewater systems. 

Near Memphis, the bill authorizes the Hatchie-Loosahatchie Ecosystem Restoration project, which covers a 39-mile stretch of the lower Mississippi River. The project aims to manage flood risks while also restoring and sustaining the health, productivity and biological diversity of the flyway. 

In New Orleans, a study was authorized to investigate ecosystem restoration and water supply issues, such as the mitigation of future saltwater wedges that threaten drinking water and wetlands at the very end of the Mississippi River. 

More support for the Upper Mississippi River Restoration program 

The law also increases the amount of money Congress can give to the Upper Mississippi River Restoration program, which funds habitat restoration activities and scientific research on the upper river. 

Congress increased the money it can direct to the research part of the program by $10 million, bringing the total the program can get to $100 million annually. 

The funding boost “really is a recognition of the value of the science … the understanding that has improved about how the system is functioning over the last three decades,” said Marshall Plumley, the Army Corps’ regional manager for the program. 

If given extra funding, Plumley said program staff want to use it to better understand the effects of the increased amount of water that has flowed through the river in recent years. That increase, partly attributed to wetter conditions due to climate change, is changing the river’s floodplain habitats, including forests and backwater areas. 

A change to how new water infrastructure gets funded

The Mississippi River functions as a water superhighway, transporting around $500 million tons of goods each year. Infrastructure to keep shipping running smoothly is costly, and one adjustment in WRDA 2024 is aimed at shifting the burden of those costs. 

Taxpayers have been funding inland waterway infrastructure for nearly two centuries, but in 1978 Congress established the Inland Waterways Trust Fund, which requires the private shipping industry to pitch in. 

Today, the trust fund’s coffers are filled by a 29-cent per gallon diesel tax on commercial operators that use the Mississippi River and other inland waterways, adding up to about $125 million per year in recent years. New construction — like wider, more modern locks and dams on the upper river — is paid for through a public-private partnership: the private dollars in the fund, and federal dollars allocated by Congress. 

Until recently, the private dollars covered 35% of new construction costs, and federal dollars covered 65%. The new WRDA adjusts that to 25% and 75%, respectively. 

Advocates for the shipping industry have long believed taxpayers should have a bigger hand in funding construction because it’s not just shippers who benefit from an efficient river. 

The balance in the trust fund “always limits” construction that can happen in a given year, said Jen Armstrong, director of government relations for the Waterways Council. 

“We can’t afford to have projects take three decades or two decades to complete,” Armstrong said, “because we have other locks that are deteriorating.” 

Armstrong said she believes shifting more of the cost to the federal government will accelerate those projects. 

Not everyone supports the cost share change, however, including American Rivers, which has opposed the creation of new locks on the upper Mississippi in favor of helping the river revert to more natural processes. 

Kelsey Cruickshank, the group’s director of policy and government relations, called it “a disappointing development that continues to give short shrift to the incredible ecosystem of the world’s third-largest freshwater river system.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

New federal law addresses climate extremes and flooding along Mississippi River is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Jerry Boardman doesn’t remember exactly when he started collecting acorns in the fall.

But the thousands upon thousands of them he gathers to share with people working to improve habitat along the Mississippi River makes the 81-year-old resident of De Soto, Wisconsin, a small village between La Crosse and Prairie du Chien, a pretty big deal.

“It’s like a myth or a legend,” Andy Meier, a forester for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who receives a portion of Boardman’s bounty, said of the integral role it plays in his work. “It just has always been that way.”

In reality, Boardman began collecting around the time that the need for acorns — a nut that contains the seed that grows oak trees — was growing critical. For the past few decades, the trees that grow in the Mississippi River floodplain, known as floodplain forests, have been struggling. Although they’re named for their ability to withstand the river’s seasonal flooding, they’ve recently been overwhelmed by higher water and longer-lasting floods.

Overall, forest cover along the stretch of the river from Minnesota down to Clinton, Iowa, decreased by roughly 6% between 1989 and 2010, according to a 2022 report on ecological trends on the upper Mississippi. In the years since, losses in some places have neared 20% — and were particularly acute following a massive flood event in 2019. 

What exactly is driving the excess water isn’t fully fleshed out, but climate change and changes in land use that cause water to run off the landscape faster are likely factors.

The result is mass stretches of dead trees that can no longer perform their functions of providing wildlife habitat, sucking up pollutants that would otherwise run downriver and slowing water during floods.  

Floodplain forests in the lower section of the river are also diminished. The Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, which stretches from where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet, in Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico was once almost entirely forest. Today, about 30% of that land is treed.  

Government agencies and various nonprofits are attempting to reverse the forestland decline by planting new trees, and volunteers like Boardman are key to the effort. 

Local is best

Reno Bottoms, a sprawling wetland habitat on the river near Boardman’s hometown of De Soto, is one place where tree die-off has been extensive. Boardman, who has been a commercial fisherman, hunter and trapper on the river for most of his life, called the change in forest cover in recent years “shocking.” To combat it, he puts in about 100 hours a year between August and October gathering acorns from the floodplain in De Soto, Prairie du Chien and La Crosse. 

To maximize his time, Boardman uses a contraption not unlike ones used to pick up tennis balls to scoop up the acorns. One small variety, though, requires one to “get down on your hiney or your knees” to pick them up, he said. For those, he relies on a little grunt work.

The idea is that if the trees that produced the acorns were successful enough at warding off flood damage to drop seeds, those seeds might be similarly resilient if replanted.

Boardman looks for acorns from the bur oak, pin oak and swamp white oak, the latter of which is particularly well suited to the floodplain forest. And the numbers he puts up are impressive — last year, he collected about 130,000; this year, 65,000.

He splits up the total to give to the Army Corps and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, both of which have foresters planting trees to restore floodplain habitat.

“Pretty much everything that Jerry collects, in one way or another, will return to the river,” said Meier, the corps forester.

Last fall, for example, between 20,000 and 30,000 of Boardman’s swamp white oak acorns were scattered near McGregor Lake, a river backwater near Prairie du Chien where the corps is piloting an effort to protect trees from flood inundation by raising the forest floor a few inches.

This spring, Meier said, he was “blown away” by the approximately 1,000 seedlings that had taken root there and begun to sprout.

Having access to Boardman’s acorns is important because it gives the corps the chance to experiment with direct seeding, instead of buying young trees and planting them. Direct seeding is both cheaper and more likely to result in a viable tree because the seed is local.

“When we have an opportunity to get something we know came from the river, we know that it’s adapted to growing there,” Meier said.

Not every community has a Boardman, though, and many organizations doing reforestation work have to shell out for seed or look for options from further afield. 

For example, M&C Forest Seeds, based in Clarendon, Arkansas, pays seed collectors cash for acorns and then re-sells sorted seed to government agencies or nonprofits. M&C contracts with collectors to gather acorns at particular latitudes along the river, which they then market to replanting efforts at similar geographic locations. 

Living Lands and Waters, an Illinois-based environmental organization, uses nurseries to cultivate oaks from the region and distributes more than 150,000 trees annually in three-gallon pots to volunteers or individuals. 

Little by little, through the efforts of various government agencies and nonprofits, it all ends up in the ground. 

For instance, since 2007, Living Lands and Waters has planted more than 2 million trees along waterways in the Mississippi River Basin. The Nature Conservancy, using U.S. Department of Agriculture and other program funds, has reforested about a million acres across Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas in the last 30 years. Much of that acreage was on low-lying farmland prone to flooding that had once been forest.

Volunteers key to planting efforts

Whether collecting seeds or planting them, volunteers like Boardman are key to making the work happen. 

Ev Wick, a fifth grade teacher at De Soto’s Prairie View Elementary, has taken his students out for an acorn-gathering day with Boardman for the past several years. Boardman scouts the best trees ahead of time, Wick said, then the kids get to work. They can pick up between 5,000 and 6,000 in a day, propelled by friendly competitions to see who can collect the most or fill their bucket quickest.

They’re interested when Boardman tells them all the acorns they collect will eventually be planted on the islands they see in the river, Wick said. 

Last October, Living Lands and Water brought together people from groups like the Clean River Advisory Council and the Rock Island County Soil and Water Conservation District to plant oak trees near the Quad Cities. Volunteers planted 85 oak trees in a park by the Mississippi River in Illinois City, Illinois. This event helped restore forests but also provided opportunities for people to learn and connect with nature.

“We get individuals that may have never planted a tree before but want to come out because it sounds like a cool, fun thing,” said Dan Breidenstein, vice president of Living Lands and Water. “Not only did they learn how to plant a tree, but they also learned about these different species that we were doing. Every time they visit that area or drive past that building, they’re connected to the area around them, and that tree’s not going anywhere.” 

Organizers are particularly tickled when young people show up.

“My favorite part of today is being outside and in the environment because I don’t go outside much,” said Brooklyn Wilson, a high school junior who volunteered at the October event. “The most important thing to understand is that as a community we need to be able to come together and help and pick up and do what we need to do to better our environment and neighborhoods.” 

Perhaps some of the young volunteers will follow in Boardman’s footsteps. 

As for Boardman, the chance to donate acorns or otherwise help out is a no-brainer.

“That river has given me so much,” he said. “I’ve just got to give back all I can give.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Disclosure: The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, The Nature Conservancy and the Clean River Advisory Council receive funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Volunteers collect and plant acorns along Mississippi River to save struggling forests is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.