Restoration effort aided by computer model

• By AMY WOLD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Feb 25, 2008

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

Large scale coastal restoration projects like massive diversions of Mississippi River water into neighboring wetland areas are widely seen as the solution to Louisiana’s disappearing coast.

However, these large scale projects — which are included in several plans for the coast — carry with them a lot of uncertainty about how well they’ll work.

To answer some of that question, researchers at LSU and several other universities developed a computer model that was recently presented during the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference in Boston.

This model will be important as Louisiana moves forward with large-scale restoration projects, said Robert Twilley, director of the Wetland Biogeochemistry Institute at LSU and one of the people who worked on the model development.

He explained that these large-scale projects are expensive, and the public and Congress want to know what they’re going to get for their investment.

That’s where the computer model can help, he said.

The work started several years ago when numerous scientists from across the country gathered in New Orleans to come up with a plan to help stabilize Louisiana’s coastal land.

South Louisiana land is disappearing because of a combination of erosion, subsidence and other factors.

Participants in the New Orleans conference in 2006 developed a report that included a key finding that coastal Louisiana solutions would have to involve the Mississippi River, Twilley said.

One of these ideas involves redirecting the Mississippi River farther north so that more sediment could be kept in the coastal system. Right now, the extended delta at the mouth of the river directs sediment and freshwater into the Gulf of Mexico.

“You’ve got to keep the sediment from going off shore,” Twilley said.

With that in mind, Twilley then saw a presentation by Gary Parker with the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where Parker presented his capabilities to model river deltas around the world.

The two started talking, and, along with Chris Paola with the University of Minnesota and David Mohrig with the University of Texas at Austin, they developed a project that would model how much land they can build with the available sediment in the river.
 
“Our goal is to take a concept and truly move it toward construction,” Twilley said.