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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/tennessee-middle-fork-bottoms-state-park-depleted-farmland/>
"In May 2010, extraordinarily heavy rainfall hit Tennessee. In some parts of
the state, as much as 20 inches fell over two days. Dams were inundated,
waterways overflowed and communities experienced historic flooding.
Farmers in West Tennessee aren’t strangers to floods. Their farmland is
adjacent to the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, the historic floodplain of the
Mississippi River that encompasses nearly 24 million acres from southern
Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico and is one of the most flood-prone regions of
North America.
Still, 2010 was different. As the Forked Deer River overflowed, it eroded
makeshift levees and dumped sandy soil onto the farmland, making it hard to
return it to productive land, according to David Blackwood, Executive Director
of the West Tennessee River Basin Authority (WTRBA).
But this declining usefulness also made it easier to envision restoring the
land to its more natural state. And through a partnership between conservation
nonprofit The Nature Conservancy, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency and
WTRBA, that’s exactly what happened.
The result is Middle Fork Bottoms State Park, a lush 860 acre parcel teeming
with wild turkeys, Great Blue Herons, white-tailed deer and endangered bats,
among others. The project is a callback to the region’s original ecology:
Marshy wetlands, restored streams and 250,000 newly planted hardwood trees like
sycamore, cottonwood and a variety of oaks. Crucially, there’s also
recreational space so that visitors can experience the restored surroundings up
close.
This new park isn’t just a boon to the region, it’s also being used as a
blueprint for other projects in the area that aim to restore floodplains and
reintroduce natural habitats.
“We envisioned this as a demonstration project to showcase the fact that
floodplains offer natural solutions to a lot of the problems that communities
in West Tennessee face,” says Rob Bullard, The Nature Conservancy’s Director of
Freshwater Programs in Tennessee. “Whether it’s flood control, or water
quality, or wastewater assimilation. They even benefit the groundwater and the
aquifer recharge.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
