Speakers
Bryan Piazza
Dr. Bryan Piazza, director of science for The Nature Conservancy in Louisiana and the Mississippi River Basin Program, provides scientific support and strategic guidance for freshwater and coastal conservation and restoration projects in Louisiana, the Gulf of Mexico coast and the Mississippi River Basin. He has published on a number of conservation and restoration topics and is the author of a book titled The Atchafalaya River Basin – History and Ecology of an American Wetland. Bryan is currently working on efforts to: protect and restore river floodplains; develop a scientific monitoring network across the Mississippi River Basin; use nature to improve flood resilience in Louisiana; and train the next generation of conservation professionals. He also serves as an adjunct assistant professor at Louisiana State University, Nicholls State University, Southern Illinois University, and the University of Southern Mississippi.
Presentation Description
Measuring for the Future: A “Sentinel” Waterway Monitoring System for the Mississippi River BasinTA coalition of partners, led by The Nature Conservancy, designed a fully-integrated sentinel waterway monitoring system that will build upon existing systems to address shortfalls in the current monitoring networks. The Sentinel System will provide critical and standardized information on present and future flooding and flood risk, water quality and sediments, and begin to provide data to support the assessment of ecosystem health over the long-term. It will provide improved critical information for river forecasting, flood inundation mapping, sediment transport and deposition, community resilience, conservation, restoration and navigation across the entire basin. Finally, it will include a data visualization interface that will provide data to multiple users in a timely manner. The total cost to build out the system and data interfaces is approximately $23.4 million, and the system will cost about $1.1-billion in inflation-adjusted dollars over 25 years for operations and maintenance. However, taxpayers are already going to pay almost 70% of that total cost for the current networks, meaning that to implement the system will require only about a 32% increase in funding over 25 years. Our coalition is now advocating for sustained federal funding for the agencies doing the monitoring to implement the system.