Missouri Loop Mitigation Bank, LA

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The Missouri Loop Mitigation Bank, under cultivation since the 1940s, will be an important addition and buffer to restored bottomland hardwood and upland forested habitat on the USFWS Joe Oliveras Tract, a NWR site adjacent to the bank on the east and north. The bank site lies within documented black bear foraging and denning habitat, with several documented sightings on bottomland hardwood forest lands maintained by the Morehouse School Board directly south and adjacent to the bank site.

The bank also lies within the Mississippi flyway, and currently provides important resting and foraging habitat for migrating waterfowl. Restoration of its historic bottomland hardwood character will provide high quality resting, denning, nesting and foraging habitat for state and federal threatened and endangered species. Once restored, the bank site will support a diversity of bottomland hardwood community associations such as elm-ash-sugarberry, overcup oak-bitter pecan, mixed red and white oaks, sweetgum-red oaks, and small pockets of open-canopied cypress-tupelo in the lowest portions of the site which will provide protected refugia for migrating waterfowl.