Abstract
The Mississippi-Missouri River system is second in the world only to the Amazon River in main stem length (6,019 km) and ranks behind only the Amazon and the Congo Rivers (Table 1) in watershed area (3,221,000 km2) (Czawa, 1981). In contrast to most other great rivers, the Mississippi-Missouri system (hereafter the “Mississippi”) drains a fertile and largely inhabitable heartland. Its watershed extends from the Appalachian Mountains in the East to the Continental Divide of the Rocky Mountains in the West, comprising about 41 percent of the land area of the 48 conterminous United States (Fig. 1).
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Platt, R.H. (1995). The Mississippi River Basin: Crucible of National Flood Policies. In: Gardiner, J., Starosolszky, Ö., Yevjevich, V. (eds) Defence from Floods and Floodplain Management. NATO ASI Series, vol 299. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0401-2_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0401-2_24
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