Little River Drainage District conversion of Big Swamp to fertile agricultural land

Excerpt

More than a century ago, American swamps and river lowlands were considered wasteland of no value and a hindrance to land development. The Swamp Land Acts of 1849, 1850, and 1860 granted states the right to reclaim 26 million ha (64.9 million ac) of swamps through the construction of levees and open channels (ditches) to control flooding; to encourage settlement, land cultivation, and commerce; and to eliminate widespread mosquito breeding (USGS 2014). Southeast Missouri, once one of the world's largest tracts of forested bottomlands, was a vast wilderness of bald cypress (Taxodium distichum L.), tupelo (gum; Nyssa L.), hardwoods, and water (figure 1), barely accessible to settlers migrating west. In the early 1890s, these historic river floodplains and their tributaries were drained and transformed into fertile agricultural lands in an ambitious engineering feat comparable to the construction of the Panama Canal (Pracht and Banks 2002; Pierce et al. 2012).

Today this vast network of ditches (figure 2), channels, and levees in southeast Missouri bottomlands makes possible an intensive system of agriculture, which produces almost a third of Missouri's agricultural economic output and has changed the hydrology, nutrient cycling, biodiversity, and structure of the entire ecosystem (Pierce et al. 2012). Unified…