The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Paul District, in cooperation with the Flood Diversion Board of Authority, will continue its field surveys for the Fargo-Moorhead flood diversion project starting this week, announced the Corps.
USACE staff; Gulf South Research Corporation, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Ecological Specialists, Inc., from O’Fallon, Missouri, are conducting the biological surveys.
The surveys will identify and characterize fish and macroinvertebrate communities and the biological integrity within the Red River and four tributaries intersected by the flood risk management project at Fargo, North Dakota, and Moorhead, Minnesota.
These pre-construction biological surveys will take place on the Red, Sheyenne, Maple, Rush and Wild Rice rivers and are expected to be completed by the end of September 2017.
According to the Corps, as a part of an adaptive approach coordinated with natural resource agencies, pre- and post-project construction monitoring will be performed to verify the impacts resulting from the project and to assess the effectiveness of mitigation.