At the junction of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa, there's a place called Reno Bottoms, where the Mississippi River spreads out from its main channel into thousands of acres of tranquil backwaters and wetland habitat.
For all its beauty, there's something unsettling about the landscape, something hard to ignore: hundreds of dead, skeletal trees.
Billy Reiter-Marolf, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, calls it the boneyard. It's a popular spot for hunting, fishing and paddling.
"Visitors ask me, 'What's going on, what's happening here?'" Reiter-Marolf said. "It just looks so bad."
Flood-plain forests play a pivotal role in the river ecosystem — creating wildlife habitat, improving water quality, storing carbon and slowing flooding.
But they're disappearing.
As their name indicates, these forests generally withstand flooding, which happens on the Mississippi every year. In the last few decades, though, they've been swamped with high water from long-lasting floods, soaking the trees more than they can stand and causing mass die-offs. And once those taller trees die, sun-loving grasses take over the understory in thick mats that make it nearly impossible for new trees to grow.
Even before high water began to take its toll, the Upper Mississippi River flood plain had lost nearly half of its historical forest cover due to urban and agricultural land use, as well as changes to the way the water flowed after locks and dams were installed in the 1930s. A similar tale is true along the lower Mississippi.