Restoring a Legacy at Red River Refuge
With its roots high in the Texas Panhandle, two forks of the Red River confluence at the Texas-Oklahoma border to flow 1,360 miles (2,190 km) into Louisiana, draining into the Mississippi River and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. Its banks are flanked with red clay, and by the time its waters reach Natchitoches Parish in Louisiana, the damp and soggy soil spouts cypress sloughs and hickory trees.
Yet there are fewer trees flanking those banks than ever before. Millions of acres fewer.
“When most people think about deforestation, they think about the Amazon or even Central America,” said The Conservation Fund’s Louisiana state director, Ray Herndon. “What they may not know is that we have lost more than 24 million acres of bottomland hardwood forest over the last century along the Red River and lower Mississippi River valleys. Habitat destruction is more pronounced here than in any other area of the United States.”
According to scientists from Environmental Synergy Inc. (ESI), a restoration and carbon sequestration firm in Atlanta, decades of conversion from forest to marginal farmland, and the myriad flood control measures that followed, resulted in a land mass that today supports less than five million acres of bottomland hardwood forest.
“No other wetland system in North America has suffered such a tremendous reduction in area,” said Carol Jordan, ESI’s president. “Much of the remaining forest exists in fragments that are too small to support the fish, birds and other wildlife resources that were once abundant.”
Restoring these lands - a task that has called for a mix of public and private financing - is now one of The Conservation Fund’s highest priorities.
This week, the Fund will protect 1,200 acres within the Lower Mississippi River Valley with a goal of restoring the native hardwood forests to benefit wildlife and trap carbon dioxide. Using funds from its Go Zero(r) program-including donations from Dell’s Plant a Tree and Plant a Forest for Me programs-the Fund will pool donations for carbon offsets and plant the equivalent number of trees at the Red River National Wildlife Refuge.
“Those natural filters that once served as home to wading birds, migratory waterfowl and the Louisiana black bear are now gone — lost when the land was converted to agriculture in mid-1900,” said Herndon. “We’re hoping to work with our partners to put them back, one tree, one dollar, and one ton of CO2 at a time.”
Jena Thompson is director of The Conservation Fund’s GoZero Program.
