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The Mississippi River Basin (MRB) Network:
A NIWR-USGS Center for Understanding the Hydrologic, Nutrient, Sediment Cycle of Intensively Managed Landscapes across scales

Lead PIs:
Thanos Papanicolaou, UT Tennessee Water Resources Center,
Rick Cruse, Iowa Water Resources Center
Brian Miller, Illinois Water Resources Center

map of MRB

The proposed MRB Network is a bold initiative to transform research on the water environment through new infrastructure investments enabling investigations that cannot be done under the current single-investigator or collaborative projects, the current foundation of several existing research programs. Amplifying impact of existing research investments targeting Basin and Gulf issues and through-basin connections starts with a system of integrated nested measurements to facilitate investigations of: hypoxia ecological effects; watershed nutrient dynamics; agricultural and decentralized treatment (e.g., bioswales) practices on nutrient losses from land, particularly at the small watershed scale; basin-wide nutrient cycling and carbon dynamics; long-term changes in hydrology and climate and these impacts on water quality; economic and social impacts of hypoxia; and institutional interactions from catchment to basin scale and across policy domains.


The flagship campus of the University of Tennessee System and partner in the Tennessee Transfer Pathway.