Riverine Systems
Des Moines River Iowa, United States
Changing navigation infrastructure to improve water quality and fish and wildlife habitat. The Sustainable Rivers Program (SRP) is a national partnership between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)–Rock Island District and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to improve rivers by changing dam operations to restore and protect ecosystems while maintaining or enhancing authorized uses. For USACE, SRP focuses on environmental opportunities at existing water infrastructures. The Des Moines River (DSMR) SRP sought to apply those goals on the river and at Lake Red Rock and Saylorville Lake, USACE reservoirs in Iowa on the DSMR, a tributary of the Mississippi River. Efforts include flood risk management, recreation, low-flow augmentation, water supply, and fish and wildlife management. DSMR has been active in the SRP since 2015 and has accomplished several projects that advance environmental water management principles. One of the first steps of the DSMR SRP was conducting a literature review and summarizing initial hypotheses and recommendations related to the natural and current deviations in durations, frequencies, and variances from one condition to another for a variety of environmental flow components (e.g., flood pulses and low and high flows).
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