Place

Atchafalaya Basin

Also known as: Atchafalaya Swamp, Atchafalaya River Basin

The largest contiguous river-swamp ecosystem in North America — a 1.4-million-acre cypress-tupelo, bottomland-hardwood, and freshwater-marsh basin running ~140 miles from the lower Mississippi River near Simmesport south to Atchafalaya Bay on the Gulf of Mexico. The basin is the active distributary of the Mississippi, captured and managed since 1963 by the Old River Control Structure, which sends ~30% of the Mississippi's flow down the Atchafalaya to prevent the river from naturally avulsing into the basin (the geological fate the river has been working toward for ~3,000 years). The basin supports the largest active cypress-tupelo old-growth in the United States, a continuing Cajun French-speaking subsistence-fishing community, and an ongoing tension between commercial crawfish and oil-and-gas extraction interests on one side and conservation, Indigenous (United Houma Nation), and traditional-fishing interests on the other. The Atchafalaya Heritage Area was federally designated in 2006.

Scientific

The Atchafalaya is the principal active distributary of the lower [[batesville-ms|Mississippi]] — water that doesn’t go down the main stem to the Bird’s Foot Delta below [[french-quarter|New Orleans]] goes down the Atchafalaya. Without active management, the Mississippi would have already shifted course (avulsed) into the Atchafalaya Basin sometime between 1950 and 2000; the Old River Control Structure (1963) holds the river in its current channel by force, locking the distribution at 70% mainstem / 30% Atchafalaya.

Habitat: ~600,000 acres of bald-cypress and water-tupelo swamp (the largest contiguous such forest in North America), ~400,000 acres of bottomland hardwood, freshwater marsh, and sediment-bar willow forest. Wildlife: [[american-alligator|American alligator]], [[american-black-bear|black bear]] (Louisiana subspecies), bald eagle, prothonotary warbler (~30% of the global population breeds here), wood duck, and substantial bobcat, river otter, and white-tailed deer populations. The basin is one of the principal wintering grounds for the Mississippi Flyway.

The basin is also the primary U.S. [[red-swamp-crawfish|crawfish]]-fishery source — most of the ~150 million pounds of [[red-swamp-crawfish|Procambarus clarkii]] (red swamp crawfish) consumed annually in Louisiana and exported nationwide come from Atchafalaya Basin commercial fishing or from rice-and-crawfish rotational ponds adjacent to the basin.

Cultural

The basin is the rural heartland of Cajun [[arabi|Louisiana]] — French-speaking descendants of the Acadians expelled from Nova Scotia by the British in Le Grand Dérangement (1755–1764), who resettled across south [[arabi|Louisiana]] from the 1760s onward. The Cajun communities along the basin’s edges (Henderson, Catahoula, Pierre Part, Bayou Sorrel, Plaquemine) developed a continuing subsistence-fishing-and-trapping economy and a distinctive French-Catholic-and-African-influenced foodway (gumbo, jambalaya, étouffée, boudin, andouille). The United Houma Nation has continuous presence on the lower basin and the surrounding bayous.

The basin’s commercial fishing community is in active conflict with oil-and-gas interests over canal cutting and saltwater intrusion, and with absentee landowners who have increasingly fenced off and posted historically-open swamp access. The Atchafalaya Basinkeeper non-profit, founded 2004 by Dean Wilson, is the principal advocacy organization for fishery, traditional-access, and conservation interests in the basin.

What links here, and how

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Scientific

contains

Cypress-tupelo swamp the largest contiguous cypress-tupelo swamp in North America

shares substrate with

New Orleans the rural-Louisiana swamp counterpart to the city; Cajun-French foodways and the principal cypress-tupelo basin upstream

contained by

Red swamp crawfish the principal wild-harvest source for the U.S. crawfish fishery

3 inbound links · 4 outbound

Scientific

Cultural

See also

What links here, and how