In July 1994, the Upper Mississippi River (UMR) served as a nexus for coalescing scientific information and management issues related to worldwide floodplain river ecosystems. The objective of the conference ‘Sustaining the Ecological Integrity of Large Floodplain Rivers: Application of Ecological Knowledge to River Management’, was to provide presentations of current ideas from the scientific community. To translate the many lessons learned on other river systems to operational decisions on the UMR, a companion workshop for managers and the general public was held immediately after the conference.

An immediate local need for such sharing has existed for several years, as the U.S. Corps of Engineers is currently planning commercial navigation activities that will influence the ecological integrity of the river over the next half century. Recently, other equally important management issues have surfaced, including managing the river as an element of the watershed, and assessing its ecological value as a system instead of a collection of parts (Upper Mississippi River Conservation Committee, 1993). Regional and state natural resource agencies are becoming more convinced that they need to address these issues within their own authorities, however spatially limited, rather than relying on the U.S. Corps of Engineers to manage the ecosystem as an adjunct to its purpose of navigation support.