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Fixing a Swamp's Broken Plumbing

Ann Marie Awad

The Nature Conservancy is beginning a long term restoration effort in the Bayou Sorrell region of the Atchafalaya Basin. Bryan Piazza is a scientist for The Nature Conservancy working on that project.

“The restoration,” he says “is fixing the broken plumbing that is a problem in the Basin.”

According to Piazza, here’s how the plumbing should work:

“These distributaries deliver water to the forest, where it slows down, the nutrients are deposited, it fertilizes the trees, it helps everything grow, it helps the fish, it helps the crawfish, and then that water is supposed to come and drain, re-enter these waterways, and flow down eventually to the Gulf of Mexico.”

But the water doesn’t always move like that—often, it gets trapped in the woods and drowns young cypress trees. 

If the Basin’s plumbing isn’t fixed, scientists aren’t sure what will happen. Piazza says one option is that forested areas could turn into open water. The second possibility is that cypress-tupelo forests are replaced by flood tolerant shrubs. According to Jim Bergan, another scientist for The Nature Conservancy, locals have a name for those areas: sick swamp. Bergan adds those areas aren’t very productive biologically and locals can’t crawfish there.

Restoring the Basin and fixing the water have tangible benefits, like protecting cypress forests. But the Atchafalaya Basin is important to people, like hunters and fishermen, too. “They can recount story after story of when they were young,” Bergan says, “and what they’ve seen and the changes that they’ve seen happen. And it’s a sadness that comes over them.”

The Nature Conservancy hopes their first restoration effort in this area, the East Grand Lake project, will reverse those changes.