Atchafalaya Basin

Why should it be a National Park?

One of the United States' most well-known, but also least appreciated landscapes are the bayous. While the Everglades, Biscayne, and Congaree National Parks all protect environments that people perceive as swamps, each of these wetlands contain very different landforms, plants, and animals than the bayous. The bulk of bayous are found along the Gulf Coast between Houston and the Florida panhandle, with the highest concentration in Louisiana. The Atchafalaya Basin is the nation's largest river swamp, containing almost one million acres of America's most significant bottomland hardwoods, swamps, bayous, and backwater lakes. The delta system found here is at the convergence of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atchafalaya River, stretching through parts of eight parishes (Louisiana's term for counties due to early French settlers). The brackish waters and the island forests that populate the Atchafalaya basin foster crawfish, shrimp, catfish, frogs, toads, alligators, crocodiles, herons, turtles, spoonbills, snakes, and many other species.

Over the last two centuries, massive dredging and efforts to use the basin as an overflow for Mississippi River floods have reshaped the lands into a spillway and disrupted the flora and fauna. Small sections of the basin have been federally designated as National Wildlife Refuges and a National Heritage Area, which The National Park Service defines as a place designated by Congress where natural, cultural, historic and scenic resources combine to form a cohesive, nationally distinctive landscape arising from patterns of human activity shaped by geography.