Louisiana Wetlands Part One: Whats the problem?

Grand Isle, with a population of 1500 people, is the only inhabited barrier island in Louisiana. During the summers, however, 12000 people inhabit the 7-mile-long islands for fishing rodeos like the International Tarpon Rodeo. Grand Isle is surrounded by wetlands, and has actually lost land in the years previously due to the decreasing wetland size. I wasnt able to find an exact statistic on how much land the island has lost, but I did find the following maps of Louisiana documenting the loss of land between 1937 and 2000, and projected loss from 1932-

2050, respectively.

(Maps via www.upliftingthecoast.com)

Louisiana boasts four million acres of wetlands, which is 40% of the U.S. total. However, every 38 minutes, a football field size of wetlands is taken over by water in Louisiana. The U.S.

Geological Survey has estimated that 2400 square miles of land in Louisiana will have been lost by 2050, an area 25 times the size of Washington D.C. This loss is happening at the astonishing rate of 25000 acres per year. The annual loss to property owners along the coast is $50 million, all of which is due to erosion. Over the next sixty years, 25% of all homes within 500 feet of the shoreline will be gone, a huge problem for the small town of Grand Isle. Tourism is also a big income for Louisiana, especially Grand Isle. If the beach is eroded or polluted, the tourists will stay away. The loss of habitat also hurts the commercial fishing business. Louisiana provides over a billion dollars in resources and services to the continental United States. Coastal Erosion occurs along beaches and shorelines. Both wind action and water action have important parts in this process and constantly change the boundary between land and water. Coastal Erosion takes away forever from one area to deposit it someplace else. (Uplifting the Coast) The beach, more pertinently Grand Isles beach, is constantly pounded by waves. Eventually, the wind blows the sand away and it is replaced by water. Human intervention also has a huge effect on the loss of the wetlands. Since the colonization of Louisiana, only 50% of the wetlands have been lost. 20% were lost in the last 100 years at 10 times the natural rate of wetland loss. The main disturbances, levees, dredging of canals, draining, and filling. In the 1920s, large-scale river control systems were built to divert 30% of the Mississippi River in order to avoid flooding. However, this dramatically decreased the sedimentary land being dropped off in the Mississippi delta. Levees effect the wetlands in the same way. Flood overtopping and overbank sedimentation, both vital to the survival of existing marshes, were dramatically reduces as large areas ceased to be flooded. River water also helped to reduce marsh salinity and provide nutrients, and its loss has resulted in the break-up and dispersal of large amounts of nutrient-starved marshlands. Canal dredging has also had one of the most damaging effects on the wetlands. Canals now account for 6.8% of Louisianas total wetland area. After canals are dredged, the plants are unable to recolonize and the canals grow bigger and bigger. The most destructive example is the Mississippi River gulf outlet, which was created in the 1960s to create a passage for ships to the Gulf of Mexico. This, by itself, destroyed over 23000 acres of wetlands and has now grown to a whopping 250% of the original size. Eutrophication is another major problem caused by chemical and industrial pollutants, human waste, and agricultural run-off. Excess chemicals released by these different pollutants cause the wetland plants to die, breaking the marsh apart. Humans also drain and fill wetlands, destroying them for commercial use, and dumping pollutants directly into them. As more and more people move to Louisiana, more buildings and houses are needed for them to live and work on. Levees are built to prevent these places from being flooded. Pollution increases, and plants and animals are put out of their habitat.

Wetlands have also suffered from saltwater intrusion, which led to changes in the soils salinity and therefore the death of vegetation, storm damage, which erode the land and push salt water into fresh marshes, land subsidence, which is the sinking of the soil that was once counteracted with the annual flooding of the Mississippi river, and the rise in global sea level, caused by climate change. Resources: Coast in Crisis. Uplifting the Coast. N.d. Web. 11 Dec 2013. <http://www.upliftingthecoast.org/coastincrisis.htm>