Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Skip to content

Science to Inform Management of Floodplain Conservation Lands on the Middle Mississippi River

Metadata Updated: October 29, 2025

Within large-river ecosystems, floodplains serve a variety of important ecological functions. A recent survey of 80 managers of floodplain conservation lands along the Upper and Middle Mississippi and Lower Missouri Rivers in the central United States found that the most critical information needed to improve floodplain management centered on metrics for characterizing depth, extent, frequency, duration, and timing of inundation. These metrics can be delivered to managers efficiently through cloud-based interactive maps. To calculate these metrics, we interpolated an existing one-dimensional HEC-RAS hydraulic model for the Middle Mississippi River, which simulated water surface elevations at cross sections spaced (<1 kilometer) to sufficiently characterize water surface profiles along an approximately 800 kilometer stretch upstream from the confluence with the Mississippi River over an 80-year record at a daily time step. To translate these water surface elevations to inundation depths, we subtracted a merged terrain model consisting of floodplain LIDAR and bathymetric surveys of the river channel. We completed these calculations for an 800 kilometer stretch of the Missouri River, spanning from Rulo, Nebraska to the river's confluence with the Mississippi River. Analyzed areas include the entirety of the Mississippi River floodplain, with the exception of the St. Louis metropolitan area in which analysis was constrained to currently unleveed areas only. This approach resulted in a 29,000+ day time series of inundation depths across the floodplain using grid cells with 30 meter spatial resolution. This dataset presents 14 metrics for each of two scenarios, one using a baseline timeseries of stages from the HEC-RAS simulation and one using a timeseries of stages adjusted to account for removal of existing levees from the floodplain. These metrics are calculated on a per pixel basis and encompass a variety of temporal criteria generally relevant to flora and fauna of interest to floodplain managers, including, for example, the average number of days inundated per year within a growing season. We also include the base elevation layer that we generated to calculate depth of inundation from interpolated water-surface elevations.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date September 13, 2025
Metadata Updated Date October 29, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI USGS DCAT-US

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date September 13, 2025
Metadata Updated Date October 29, 2025
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
Identifier http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/usgs-5fdbb41ad34e30b9123d25e4
Data Last Modified 2020-12-28T00:00:00Z
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://ddi.doi.gov/usgs-data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 95797159-5cdf-4591-be93-ecb3d4a069b9
Harvest Source Id 2b80d118-ab3a-48ba-bd93-996bbacefac2
Harvest Source Title DOI USGS DCAT-US
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -90.5873, 36.9362, -89.1439, 39.0008
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 42b1d7daac07b006a05e91b4d3cbdd3bf8511b715ec28df4b4d250b25823927b
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -90.5873, 36.9362, -90.5873, 39.0008, -89.1439, 39.0008, -89.1439, 36.9362, -90.5873, 36.9362}

Didn't find what you're looking for? Suggest a dataset here.