Shrimp boat off Grand Isle, Louisiana.
Feature

States of Emergence/y: Coastal Restoration and the Future of Louisiana’s Vietnamese/American Commercial Fisherfolk

While all coastal entrepreneurs feel the strain of the decisions and projects Colten outlines above, their consequences are borne more heavily by first-generation, 1.5-generation, and second-generation Vietnamese/American fisherfolk. While all fisherfolk are concerned about environmental change and forced adaptation, language barriers, a lack of political representation, and cultural differences make Vietnamese/Americans…

NRRI researchers sort through samples collected at Lake Mille Lacs last summer to understand how invasive species are impacting the food web of walleye.
Feature

NRRI’s Systems Approach to Minnesota Water Challenges

Water equals life, and in Minnesota especially, clean water equals quality of life.  As one of our state’s most prized resources, the Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI) at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) takes water seriously.  Founded in 1983 by the state legislature, NRRI was established to balance economic development of natural resources with environmental sustainability. Applied research solutions for water challenges…

The East Bank of the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota and the Mississippi River from the Washington Avenue Bridge.
Introduction

Introduction to Issue Ten

Welcome to Issue 10 of Open Rivers, which serves as a milestone in at least two ways. First, we have achieved “double digits” in terms of issues, which many publications never achieve. Thank you to the many, many people who have made the journal happen over the years. Second, this issue focuses at home, at the University of Minnesota, where the breadth of work on water is simply staggering. The number of faculty affiliated with…

Still image from the video 'The Uncompromising Hand' (2017) by Andrea Carlson. Image courtesy of the artist.
Feature

On The Uncompromising Hand: Remembering Spirit Island

Drawing as Imagining Absence: Sometime prior to 1963 a person sat down at a table to draw a map. This person could effectively communicate with lines across a page, possessing the technical skills of rendering exact scale ratios of a three-dimensional space on a sheet of paper. The task of this artist was to draw a blueprint that would be used to harness a river for industrial use.

Hand-tinted postcard showing Iowa-Illinois Memorial Bridge over the Mississippi between Bettendorf, Iowa and Moline, Illinois circa 1930-45.
Perspectives

In Quad Cities, Reconnection to the Riverfront Is Well Into Its Fourth Decade

In January 2018, residents of the Quad Cities (Moline and Rock Island, Illinois; Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa) attended an open house exploring possibilities for “new” riverfront land left vacant by the realignment of the I-74 bridge over the Mississippi. Bridge replacements happen all the time, of course, but this meeting signaled two things: first, the continued significance of this particular stretch of the Mississippi as a transportation crossroads, and second, the ongoing vitality of the regional riverfront redevelopment programs, begun out of industrial economic crises over three decades ago.

First snow at Triple Divide Peak. Image courtesy of Daniel Lombardi.
Geographies

Where the Water Flows: Understanding Glacier’s Triple Divide Peak

Imagine pouring out a glass of water. Where does the water go?

After soaking your computer or floor, it would eventually flow to join a greater body of water and become part of a larger drainage system. Where I grew up, outside of Milwaukee, my water would join with Lake Michigan. In the Twin Cities, where I went to university, it would flow into the Mississippi River. From Jackson, Wyoming, where I’m writing now, it would combine with the Snake River and flow into the Pacific Ocean. But Glacier National Park, where I worked in the summer of 2017, has a unique little point called Triple Divide Peak.

Field work in the Minnesota basin differed from that of the St. Croix. The rivers were murkier and often lined by agricultural land. Image courtesy of Mark Hove.
Teaching and Practice

Mosquitoes, Muck, and Mussels: A Look Into Scientific Research

The aspiring young undergraduate scientists envision fieldwork as a romantic escape from the office cubicle, classroom desk, and seemingly endless pile of homework. Working alongside experts in their field, they anticipate working in the wildest regions of the world: dense tropical forests, remote mountain ranges, and distant glacial rivers. They see themselves on the forefront of groundbreaking discoveries: truly shattering the scientific community with a cure for Malaria, discovery of a new species, or theory of planetary evolution.