LOUISIANA RESEARCH


	River of data A unique wetland resource in northwest Louisiana has become a cutting-edge outdoor "laboratory" By Ashley Sexton-Gordon On a clear morning, Gary Hanson sees the sunlight reflect in the calm sheet of water topping the oxbow lake at the Red River Education & Research Park in Shreveport. He walks out onto the pier. Hundreds of white pelicans have relocated to this migratory habitat before departing later in the month for the Gulf of Mexico. Hanson notes the lake's water level has risen a bit since last week, which means the Red River's waters are flowing in. Within a few hours, automated monitoring stations on the lake will have amassed volumes of water quality data and sampled this new flux of water. Hanson is eager to see what changes have occurred in the lake. So he heads across the roadway to the adjacent LSUS campus where the faculty and staff of a new environmental laboratory will employ cutting-edge tools like atomic absorption spectrophotometry and ion chromatography to analyze these samples. Hanson, a professional geologist and hydrologist, is the director of the three-year-old LSUS Red River Watershed Management Institute-a watershed laboratory born of a unique partnership between the university and the LSU Health Sciences Center in Shreveport. He and his colleagues are monitoring the quality of water that flows through this Red River tributary and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico. Working in collaboration with other wetland researchers, the Institute is helping shape a body of work that evaluates watershed contributions to the Gulf's "dead zone" or hypoxic zone, a 7,000-square-mile area emerging as a potential threat to Louisiana's coastal fisheries. These researchers are also addressing sediment levels of the Red River and how changes in the river systems are impacting Louisiana's coastal land loss issue. The Red River From its source in New Mexico to its confluence with the Atchafalaya and Mississippi Rivers, the 1,400-mile Red River carries sediment from eight diverse ecoregions of the United States to its South Louisiana destination. Eventually these sediments, carrying high concentrations of nutrients, reach the Mississippi River Basin, an area that accepts the drainage of 41 percent of the United States through the lower Mississippi River system. Hanson, Dr. Bill Mitsch of Ohio State University and Dr. John Day of the LSU Aquatic Ecology Group are among researchers convinced that the nutrients produced in these interior watersheds contribute significantly to the development of the hypoxic zone along Louisiana's coast. This low-oxygen area forms when excessive nitrogen derived from fertilizers, animal waste and domestic sewage is carried into the Gulf from the Mississippi River Basin. Louisiana's hypoxic zone displaces marine life along the coast and affects the ecological balance in the Gulf. The problem is massive and the potential solutions are complex, but the Institute is conducting comprehensive research to understand and define more accurately the scope of current wetland conditions. National Problems on a Local Level: Hypoxia and Coastal Land Loss The Gulf's hypoxic zone rivals the largest hypoxic areas in the world, including those in the Baltic and Black seas. Diminishing populations of shrimp and fish pose a potential threat to the Gulf of Mexico's $4-billion-a-year seafood economy. Although the Gulf suffers the effects of the nutrients and sediment redistribution, the source of the nutrients is a nationwide problem involving entire interior watersheds of the Mississippi River Basin. Manmade locks and dams along major tributaries have also altered water levels in river systems, changing the distribution of wetland plants and trees. Because of manmade levies, nutrients that once fed these wetlands during floods now flow through rivers to the coast. These manmade solutions, designed to benefit commerce and recreation, have produced unintended consequences. One possible solution involves restoring some of the wetlands that have been destroyed over the past 200 years and constructing new wetlands at critical sites in the landscape. Wetland plants are vital restoration tools because of their ability to remove excessive nutrients from the water and help trap other water-borne contaminants. While many researchers are treating hypoxia and coastal land loss as separate issues, Hanson maintains there is a correlation between them. And he believes the solutions are inextricably tied to the entire watershed system. Louisiana's coast is disappearing at a rate of 25-35 square miles per year-one football field every 38 minutes. "We know one reason we are losing the coast is due to naturally occurring subsidence-or sinking," Hanson says. "We also are losing sediment and gaining nutrients throughout the tributary systems and this has affected marine habitat and land loss in the Gulf." Restoring coastal Louisiana will cost upward of $14 billion, but it is estimated the cost of inaction will amount to more than $100 billion in infrastructure alone. Louisiana and its federal partners, through the Breaux Act, have developed the Coast 2050 plan-a blueprint for restoring coastal Louisiana. The effort will be the world's largest coastal engineering project and will include sediment diversions, marsh creation, barrier island restoration, shoreline protection, delta management, river water re-introduction, sediment and nutrient trapping, and vegetative planting along the state's extensive coastline. The solution will require decades, reinforcing the imperative for comprehensive research in the watersheds of the Mississippi River system. So, LSUS has initiated public education about the nationwide scope of the problem while studying it locally at its unique wetlands laboratory in northwest Louisiana. Red River Education & Research Park During the largest flood of the 20th century in Northwest Louisiana, the Red River dramatically changed course in 1945, creating an oxbow lake-Old River Lake-and a natural wetlands area in what would become southeast Shreveport. The lake is home to diverse wildlife and plant life that thrive on its periodic flooding. At the time, no one knew how important this natural phenomenon would become to a state university that would be created 22 years later, much less to all of Louisiana. Yet today, the Red River Education & Research Park is a sprawling, high-tech, outdoor "laboratory" that is making an enormous impact on the environmental future of the Red River as well as the state. The park offers opportunities for students, teachers and the public to study the river and its watershed up close. The 585-acre area, commonly known as the C. Bickham Dickson Park, is the largest natural wetland in the country attached to a university and operated as a research site. Situated in the active floodplain of the Red River and only a couple of hundred miles from its lower reaches, LSUS researchers are in a unique position to study the dynamic floodplain processes of a major river system and evaluate a variety of wetland restoration approaches. Research at the Park is multidisciplinary and integrated. Dr. Dalton Gossett and Dr. Steve Banks are among LSUS researchers who are including students in their field-based research. They are studying how floodwaters affect the nutrient budget of crops such as sorghum, which is an important agricultural feed source. Hanson and his students handle the hydrology, while Dr. Malcolm McCallum focuses on amphibian response to contaminants and conducts environmental follow-up research. Researchers are using state-of-the-art equipment and technology to address the goal of ensuring water quality of one of the major river systems in North America. Water quality and water level data are collected continuously at an automated water sampling and monitoring station and telemetered to the campus. Data from two new monitoring stations will be available to other researchers and the public through the Institute's Web site. One of the new telemetered sites, LTEMP-Long-term, Tethered Environmental Monitoring Platform, is an innovative monitoring approach. Programmed sensors that are suspended from a floating platform anchored in the lake collect data at precise depths in the water column, even during major floods when water levels can rise 20 feet or more. Data are also collected during research cruises aboard the RV George Khoury, a 24-foot pontoon boat with two cutting-edge tools: an Acoustic Current Doppler Profiler for measuring river flow at all depths and the LISST-25, a Laser In-Situ Scattering Transmissometer, capable of detecting and measuring the size and concentration of suspended sediments. In February 2002, an LSUS-led consortium, including Halliburton Energy Services and MHC X-Ploration Drilling, of Tyler, Texas, drilled and logged a 300-foot monitoring well enabling researchers to track changes within the park's groundwater system and evaluate new bore-hole technologies. For the first time anywhere in the world, this state-of-the-art oil and gas technology was used to evaluate these underground resources. Magnetic resonance imaging logging, used worldwide by Halliburton for oil exploration, is based on clinical MRI technology and allows researchers to "see" into the sediments around the borehole. Institute researchers see a big picture for addressing Louisiana's watershed and coastal problems and are influencing others across state lines. They are doing all this with diverse funding, a natural laboratory and a wealth of support from LSUS and its Chancellor, Dr. Vincent J. Marsala, and the community. Louisiana 4th District U.S. Rep. Jim McCrery's support has been indispensable in securing federal funding for the Institute, including the first-ever congressional earmark for the university. Adapting to Change with Community Outreach Critical to the development of the Red River Education & Research Park three years ago was a cooperative agreement between the city of Shreveport and LSUS. This long-term agreement provided for the establishment of a strategic planning committee composed of a diverse group of community stakeholders to create detailed plans for use of the park. Concurrently, LSUS representatives, city government and members of the community formed a steering committee to assist with park management and development. "We are making a difference because we're involving a wide section of the public," Hanson says. "We are educating the public and encouraging them to action. We didn't just establish a park, we are making it work." Cooperative action is exactly what researchers studying hypoxia and coastal land loss are counting on. Although land loss has become a pivotal environmental and political issue, the study and solution of hypoxia is still in its early stages and has received only minimal federal funding. By focusing on the total problem from the source of the Mississippi River systems to their release in the Gulf of Mexico, LSUS, working with other researchers and institutions throughout the basin, hopes to encourage a total solution. The Institute is young, but its success and the support it has received have encouraged other small universities along the Red River's watersheds to begin concentrating on wetlands and watersheds research with a focus on the entire river system. This collective process is precisely what the LSUS Institute believes must happen up and down all major tributaries leading into the Gulf, including the centrally located Mississippi River. The Red River Watershed Management Institute is a working template for future "place-based" watershed research centers. Ideally, every major river system would house at least one watershed institute along with smaller satellite project sites. Only then could changes to sediment and nutrients throughout the entire Mississippi River system begin to be understood. Data collection and research are a slow process, but hypoxia and coastal land loss will challenge researchers and residents for generations to come. Even with a multi-billion dollar solution to save the Gulf Coast, there will never be a complete remedy because nature cannot be contained. Researchers at the Watershed Management Institute know this, as do their colleagues nationwide. They are staking their future on this fact. The expertise and technology created by the applied research of wetland systems throughout watersheds and coastal areas may ultimately become as colossal as those developed by the oil and gas industry. For now, the LSUS Red River Watershed Management Institute is making its own waves as a state-of-the art research center with a concentrated focus on public awareness and involvement. Discovery and long-term solutions for hypoxia and coastal land loss will remain its definitive goal. And the passion of Gary Hanson and other Institute researchers will continue making a big impact from their small watershed in Shreveport, Louisiana.