Alex Fries and I had the chance to represent UMCES at the Conference on Ecosystem and Ecological Restoration (CEER) on the New Orleans riverfront from July 28 to August 1, 2014. I presented on our … Alex Fries at the UMCES booth … CEER Conference a good venue for the Mississippi Report Card … There could not have been a more appropriate location to talk about a report card for the Mississippi River than New Orleans, Louisiana this July.

Read more

Since Memphis, Tennessee is the blues music capital of the world, just upriver from the jazz music capital in New Orleans and a short distance from Nashville, TN, the country music capital, it seemed appropriate to capture our lower Mississippi River workshop in the form of a blues song. Memphis is where Sam Phillips at Sun Records recorded such music luminaries as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins.

Read more

Once again, a contingent from IAN (Heath Kelsey, Bill Nuttle, Caroline Wicks, Brianne Walsh and me) gathered along the banks of the mighty Mississippi River to meet with a diverse stakeholder group to discuss the issues associated with the Mississippi River. In this case, we learned about the issues associated with the lower Mississippi River, which were surprisingly different from the issues in the Upper Mississippi River and the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers from our previous workshops.

Read more

Last week, I attended a meeting of the Changing Course design competition in New Orleans. The Changing Course competition will stimulate innovative thinking about the future shape of coastal Louisiana, including possibly relocating the main channel of the Mississippi River below New Orleans - hence its name. The purpose of this meeting was to bring together the eight teams invited to enter the competition to review the issues at stake and answer questions about the competition.

Read more