The Missouri River

The Missouri River. . , You're standing on a refuge that is 7,440 acres of diverse habitat along the eastern edge of the Missouri River floodplain. With a distance of more than 2,341 miles, the Missouri River is America's Longest River and flows from the Rocky Mountains through Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri, eventually joining the Mississippi River in St. Louis. , Today, the Missouri River floodplain is highly engineered and controlled. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, other government agencies and conservation groups are working to restore and rehabilitate some of the former channels and floodplain habitats of the Missouri River. Habitats such as floodplains and wet prairies are conserved and restored to mimic wildlife habitats that were lost or affected during the channelization of the Missouri River. , The journals of Lewis and Clark describe the Missouri River corridor in 1804 as a wild mix of prairie, floodplain, forest, water, sand, sky and mosquitoes. Fast, shallow, and wide the river was ever changing, shifting sandbars and carving riverbanks. The carving riverbanks dropped trees into the river and produced heavy sediment loads that earned the river the nickname "Big Muddy." , The land and rivers have been altered forever both by natural changes and by people who came after Lewis and Clark. The mix of prairie and forest along its banks and in its floodplain is nearly gone. The highly variable flows of the river are now evened out by a large system of dams, reservoirs, levees and channel narrowing that diminished the river's carrying capacity during floods. , Today, the lower Missouri River is confined to a bank-stabilized channel that is much narrower, substantially deeper, and probably even faster that the river described by Lewis and Clark. These changes in the river and other development of the landscape have led to a drastic decline in the populations of animals that relied on the natural flood cycles of the Missouri River.