the Mississippi River (Chatry and Chew 1985).
When freshwater diversions were planned over two
decades ago, the primary goal was to reduce salinity
to enhance oyster production in surrounding
regions (Chatry et al. 1983). More recently, diversions
have increasingly been used as a way of delivering
sediments and nutrients to wetlands in an
attempt to counter RSLR (Day and Templet 1989).
There has been controversy about the effects of
diverting Mississippi River water into coastal wetlands
because of possible eutrophication as currently
observed in Louisiana's offshore waters
(Turner and Rabalais 1991; Rabalais et al. 1994).
Eutrophication in the estuary itself is less likely because
environments with high turbidity caused by
river inputs of suspended sediments usually have
low phytoplankton productivity due to low light
availability (Cloern 1987). Wetlands are natural
sinks for nutrients (Hatton et al. 1982; Sharp et al.
1982; Reddy et al. 1993), and thus represent a viable
mechanism for decreasing the nutrient load
of river water prior to reaching offshore. There are
a number of changes which take place in the
chemistry of river water as it flows into an estuary
and mixes with sea water. Nitrate-nitrogen, for example,
can be lost to the atmosphere through