Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center

Decision Support Systems

Middle Mississippi River Decision Support System

The Middle Mississippi River is described as the section of the Mississippi River between the confluence of the Missouri and Ohio rivers (Figure 1). The Middle Mississippi River and its floodplain have been substantially modified to accommodate multiple human uses that include urban development, navigation, and agriculture. Consequently, policy makers in state and federal agencies frequently face difficult decisions regarding management of biological resources in the river.

The Middle Mississippi River Decision Support System (MMRDSS) provides a framework to assist decision makers regarding natural resource issues in the Middle Mississippi River floodplain. The MMRDSS is designed to provide users with a spatially explicit tool for tasks such as inventorying existing knowledge, developing models to investigate the potential effects of management decisions, generating hypotheses to advance scientific understanding, and developing scientifically defensible studies and monitoring. To facilitate development of the Decision Support System (DSS), an interagency workshop was held in Cape Girardeau, Missouri in February 2002. The workshop focused on hydrologic and other system drivers of aquatic habitats and their role structuring aquatic habitats and habitat connectivity. Workshop participants identified GIS data themes that might be useful for addressing key aquatic resource issues in the Middle Mississippi River such as pallid sturgeon, habitat restoration, habitat connectivity, and ecologically meaningful classification systems for large rivers.

Figure 1. Location of Middle Mississippi River

The MMRDSS provides access to a suite of program tools to assist users in evaluating differences in complexity, connectivity and structure of aquatic habitats among river reaches. Advanced tools were developed for the MMRDSS as Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc (ESRI), ArcView 3.x Avenue scripts that generate information and GIS themes derived from floodplain planforms, including flood frequency, sinuosity index (Figure 2 and Figure 3), shoreline development ratio, Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) measure of river training structures, hypsometric integral, and Fragstats 3.3 landscape metrics. The MMRDSS final report will include a User's Manual accompanied by two CD-ROMs containing the data collected for the MMR and the MMRDSS ArcView 3.x project. The User's Manual will be downloadable from this website in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format and the CD-ROMs will be made available upon request. This project will be completed in March 2005. Principal Investigators: Steven Zigler and Jason Rohweder

Figure 2. Sinuosity Index input dialog window (click for larger scale) Figure 3. Sinuosity Index output themes (click for larger scale)

Jason J. Rohweder¹, Steven J. Zigler¹, Steven N. Hulse², and Timothy J. Fox¹

¹U.S. Geological Survey
Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center
2630 Fanta Reed Road
La Crosse, Wisconsin 54603

²Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences
U.S. Geological Survey
Cooperative Research Unit
302 ABNR Building
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211-7240