DRAGON Asia Summit 2009

Connecting Great Deltas, Great Lakes, and Great Rivers

The DRAGON (DELTA RESEARCH AND GLOBAL OBSERVATION NETWORK) Partnership was created in December 2007 following Hurricane Katrina and its impact on the vulnerable Mississippi River Delta. This devastating storm brought new urgency to the critical need to share information and data from major deltas around the world. Comparative studies with other large deltas are essential to understanding and predicting the effects of climate change, engineering projects, land use, hydrological change, and other anthropogenic impacts in these sensitive ecosystems. The ultimate goal of the DRAGON Partnership is to provide science to harmonize the human activities and natural ecological processes in the Mississippi Delta and other major deltas around the world.

The purpose of the DRAGON Asia Summit was to forge new global partnerships to develop the science needed to inform decision making in the Mekong, Mississippi, and other large river and delta systems around the globe. The complexities and challenges to sustainability in large Asian deltas, such as the Mekong, Huang He, and the Ganges-Brahmaputra make these systems ideal for the development of new tools and technologies to integrate local data to produce large scale ecological forecasts for the future. The DRAGON Asia Summit featured sessions and special symposia related to the Mekong and Mississippi Deltas and integrated ecological, agricultural, and hydrological sciences with social systems, education, poverty alleviation, and other societal dimensions.

Sponsors and the organizing committee include the International Crane Foundation, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, the Caddo Lake Institute, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

For further information, contact:

NWRC Director’s Office
USGS National Wetlands Research Center
700 Cajundome Blvd.
Lafayette, LA 70506 USA
TEL.: (01) 337.266.8501 / FAX: (01) 337.266.8610
delta@usgs.gov