RESEARCH TEAM STUDIES MISSOURI RIVER FLOOD

JEFFERSON CITY -- The great Missouri River flood of 1993 is a fading memory to many Missourians, but it is very much alive to a group of about 30 researchers and technicians working on a long-term study. They hope to determine what effects the flood had on wild animals, from mice to reptiles, fish and birds.

Karen Bataille is a wildlife staff biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation. "The purpose of the Missouri River Post Flood Evaluation project is to evaluate the scour hole left by the flood and to determine their value to fish and wildlife," Bataille says. She adds the flood has given researchers from state and federal agencies an opportunity to learn about floodplains and the fish and wildlife habitat that has been missing since the river was channelized.

The flood has opened up some of the floodplain for fish and wildlife because some of the damaged areas have been purchased by MDC or are enrolled in the federal Wetland Reserve Program now. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has bought some flood-damaged tracts for the Big Muddy National Wildlife Refuge. Many of these areas are no longer protected by levees and will be open to future flooding. Wetland Reserve is a program of the United States Department of Agriculture that lets farmers and landowners set aside land in permanent or long-term easements, creating wetlands that can't be farmed or disturbed.

One of the results of the study is the discovery that there is a need for more than one type of wetland in the floodplain. Necessary wetlands range from temporary basins to permanent oxbows, like those at Cooley Lake and Sunshine Lake, as well as smaller scour holes created by the flood.

In dry years, shorebirds, like plovers and sandpipers, can probe for worms and small mollusks on mud flats edging scour holes or oxbow wetlands. In wet years, when scour holes are flooded too deeply to be useful to shorebirds, the birds can shift to mudflats on the temporary basins. "We see a need for a series of wetlands of all different types," Bataille says. Bataille says that conservation areas left open to seasonal floods will complement managed wetland areas such as Grand Pass Conservation Area near Marshall. She also notes that bird use of floodplain wetlands is opportunistic, and that it depends on the degree and timing of basin flooding. She says that the timing, depth and severity of flooding affects vegetation.