Louisiana Waterways Among Most Polluted In Nation, Report Says

A 10-year-old girl walks to the edge of the Kansas River in Topeka, Kansas, rolls up a note, and slips it into a plastic bottle before sending it downstream. Sixteen years, hundreds of miles, and two rivers later, Michael Coyne-Logan, an educational facilitator for Living Lands and Waters, hoists it from the Mississippi River in St. Louis. That is one bottle among the millions of pounds of trash that he and his cleanup crew have collected in recent years as they try to make a dent in the enormous amount of garbage floating down the Mississippi.

Louisiana's Disappering Coast

Plaquemines is where the river meets the sea. On maps, it appears as a thick, muscular arm stretching into the Gulf of Mexico, with the Mississippi running, like a ropy blue vein, down the center. At the very end of the arm, the main channel divides into three, an arrangement that calls to mind fingers or claws, hence the area's name - the Bird's Foot. Seen from the air, the parish has a very different look. If it's an arm, it's a horribly emaciated one. For most of its length - more than sixty miles - it's practically all vein.

Louisiana's Vanishing Coast: Before And After Images Show A Decade's Loss

The scars of coastal loss, accelerated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, still can be seen on the wetlands surrounding New Orleans, visible in before and after images taken by combined camera and sensor devices aboard NOAA Landsat satellites. Wetlands surrounding Delacroix are shown a week before Katrina, with normal vegetation showing up as bright green and water as blue. The Caernarvon Freshwater Diversion Project releases water from the Mississippi River into the Big Mar, and it eventually flows southeast through these wetlands.

I'Ve Investigated Industrial Pollution For 35 Years. We'Re Going Backwards

The threat of exposure to noxious chemicals - in the air, the land or the water - is nothing new in Louisiana. The state has ranked No. 2 in toxic emissions, behind Texas, just about every year since 1988, when the EPA began requiring industry to tally its pollution. That year, the first in which the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory was published, Louisiana's petrochemical plants acknowledged releasing nearly 1 billion pounds of hazardous wastes at their plant sites, or about 238 pounds for every person then in Louisiana.

Long-Term Performance In Seagrass Restoration Projects In Florida, Usa

Seagrass restoration is a common tool for ecosystem service enhancement and compensatory mitigation for habitat loss. However, little is known about the long-term performance of these projects. We identified seagrass restoration projects by reviewing historic permitting documents, monitoring reports, and studies conducted in Florida, USA, most of which have not been cited previously in peer-reviewed literature.

Invasive Species Removal Increases Species And Phylogenetic Diversity Of Wetland Plant Communities

Plant invasions result in biodiversity losses and altered ecological functions, though quantifying loss of multiple ecosystem functions presents a research challenge. Plant phylogenetic diversity correlates with a range of ecosystem functions and can be used as a proxy for ecosystem multifunctionality. Laurentian Great Lakes coastal wetlands are ideal systems for testing invasive species management effects because they support diverse biological communities, provide numerous ecosystem services, and are increasingly dominated by invasive macrophytes.

Irish Teenager Wins Google Science Award For Removing Microplastics From Oceans

Ferreira's project used a novel, but effective methodology for removing ocean plastics. He used magnets to attract microplastics from water. The project found that a magnetic liquid called ferrofluid attracted the tiny plastic particles and removed them from the water. After nearly a thousand tests, his device successfully removed about 88 percent of the microplastics from water samples, according to The Irish Times.