The Nature Conservancy’s Mississippi River Basin Project: An Overview and Implications for Conservation in the Upper Mississippi River Basin

October 8 at 7pm​, LWV UMRR hosted a talk by Steve Herrington, Associate Director of Water for the Minnesota-North Dakota-South Dakota Chapter of The Nature Conservancy and Amy Cazier, TNC Water Quality Technician.  This presentation describes The Nature Conservancy's Mississippi River Basin Project, outlining their work and ways that others can help to support it.  

The video of this presentation is linked to the right.  

LWV UMRR hosts five-six talks like this every year; see other videos on our "Past Program Videos" page.    

Synopsis of the presentation:
Encompassing 1,245 million square miles in 31 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces, the Mississippi River and its tributaries nourish crops, transport goods, provide recreational opportunities and sustain robust fisheries. The river system brings food, fresh water, jobs, and economic security to millions of Americans. Today, the Mississippi River faces unprecedented challenges. Increasingly intense flooding, nutrient runoff that creates a Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico, invasive species, and changing flows strain the river’s infrastructure and threaten homes, communities, and livelihoods.
 
The Nature Conservancy has set ambitious goals to transform how they conduct and influence conservation across the whole basin to ensure its long-term resilience for nature and people alike. They are developing projects, partnerships, and policies that protect essential lands, habitats, and waters, while deepening our understanding of the connections between people and place. This presentation will provide an overview of TNC's Mississippi River Basin project and touch on select actions in Minnesota and elsewhere in the Upper Mississippi River that contribute to a vibrant future for the Mississippi River Basin as a whole.

To learn more about this project, check out the TNC website - click here!  

Steve Herrington is the Associate Director of Water for the Minnesota-North Dakota-South Dakota Chapter of The Nature Conservancy. An aquatic ecologist with over 30 years’ experience in fish and stream ecology, Steve joined The Nature Conservancy’s Florida program in 2004 and helped develop its first freshwater conservation program. In 2012, Steve joined the Missouri Chapter and developed its first freshwater program as well as directed its science initiatives until joining the Tri-State Chapter in 2022. Steve has led and collaborated on a variety of freshwater initiatives across the U.S., including conservation planning, river restoration, dam removal and fish passage, environmental flow development, outreach and education, and implementing nature-based solutions with measurable benefits and climate change resiliency.

Amy Cazier earned her bachelor’s in biology at Kalamazoo College where she studied plant-pollinator interactions prior to a habitat enhancement project. Then she jumped into the “water world” when she served as an AmeriCorps Member in the Maine Conservation Corps. She spent a year assessing the quality of streams and wetlands using plant and macroinvertebrate populations as bioindicators, then served a second year with a land trust working with private landowners to reduce their nutrient loading through shoreline erosion control and habitat enhancement projects. Amy moved to Minnesota and joined The Nature Conservancy’s MN-ND-SD chapter in June of 2023 and works as TNC’s Freshwater Restoration Technician. Her focus is building the partnership with the US Fish & Wildlife private lands Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program and increasing the joint capacity to restore wetlands in the Mississippi headwaters. Amy says that her favorite part of her job is getting to work with dedicated landowners who work to do their part in protecting our planet through habitat, water quality and water storage.