EAGER: Collaborative Research: Invisible Floods on the Mississippi River Floodplain: Unravelling the Causes of Urban Flooding in a Community-Centered Approach to Geomorphology

Williams College, Williamstown MA

Investigators

Abstract

Stretching for over 80 miles along the Illinois bank of the Mississippi River, the area of Mississippi River Floodplain known as the American Bottom is home to over 130,000 people who depend on infrastructure that controls and curtails flooding. Although the Mississippi River is the most the significant threat to floodplain communities in the American Bottom, a system of floodplain channels has triggered some of the most widespread and damaging incidents of flooding. In some cases, substantial infilling with sediment and woody material has caused these channels to literally pour into some of the most economically vulnerable communities in the US. In this EAGER proposal, the investigators will apply a new model in the practice of geomorphology, in which scientists and community members collaborate in inquiry and data collection. They will focus their initial efforts in the community of Centreville, Illinois, where the impacts of flooding have been the most damaging. They will work directly with the community to better constrain the causes and impacts of severe flooding, and to broaden their engagement with communities of the Greater St. Louis region, they are partnering with Harris-Stowe State University to offer four summer internships to rising seniors of the university. Their goal is to build meaningful and empowering undergraduate research experiences for underrepresented minorities by designing those experiences around civic engagement and environmental science. The investigators aim to demonstrate how community-centered research that is applied to managed and inhabited landscapes can, at the same time, lead to novel and impactful insights into landscape evolution. In their case, the focus is on floodplain channels of the American Bottom. Floodplain channels have been a focus of research in geomorphology for some time, but these previous efforts have largely focused on floodplain channels whose very forms are produced and controlled by lowland rivers. Floodplain channels whose forms and function are largely independent of lowland rivers, but instead are a product of upland drainages, are much less understood. The investigators will provide the first geomorphological assessment of the floodplain channels of the American Bottom, including both natural and modified reaches. By integrating field surveys, sediment coring, and numerical experiments the investigators will: 1) calculate sediment supply rates from bluff drainages into floodplain channels; 2) determine how and why sediment transport capacity varies along floodplain channels; and 3) identify flood risks associated with channel infilling for Centreville. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.