A Guide to the Fertile Fisheries Crescent with an Emphasis on Louisiana

About this book

This book explores the influence of the Mississippi River drainage system on the Northern Gulf of Mexico between Mobile Bay, Alabama, and Sabine Pass, Texas. Through geological time, this coastline has ranged from 250 miles offshore to North Louisiana. The present coastline consists of numerous barrier islands, bays and the most extensive saline, brackish, intermediate, and fresh marsh communities in the United States. It is currently eroding because of a lack of sediment input, subsidence, and numerous dredged canals. However, as noted here, efforts to remediate the coastline are expensive and problematic, and, as a result, this highly productive, shellfish-producing coastal region of the continental United States is regularly subjected to excess nutrients from the Mississippi River and was terribly stressed by the Macondo oil leak.

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Biography

William Stickle is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biological Sciences at Louisiana State University. He earned a PhD in Biology and a minor in Oceanography (University of Alaska) from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and taught in the Zoology and Physiology Department and the Biological Sciences Department at Louisiana State University from 1972 until 2015. He has conducted research in the northern Gulf of Mexico, the San Juan Islands, Washington, southeast Alaska and Plymouth, England, and has published 97 papers.