Water Level Management for Enhanced Fish and Wildlife Habitat Production in Upper Mississippi River Navigation Pools: An Engineering with Nature Review of Practice

There is a long history of fish and wildlife management associated with Upper Mississippi River navigation dams owned and operated by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Many operational changes have been made to improve aquatic habitat, with recent emphasis on pool-scale drawdowns to enhance wetland benefits without affecting navigation or other uses. This special report describes projects successfully incorporating Engineering With Nature principles in a review of the physical setting and historical fish and wildlife habitat management efforts using Upper Mississippi River System navigation dams. We reviewed 80 years of adaptation and lessons learned about how to integrate navigation operations and wildlife management. Several experiments have revealed the capacity to produce thousands of hectares of emergent and submersed aquatic plants, restoring much-needed riparian habitat for a variety of aquatic, wetland, and avian species.