An Ecological Assessment of the 
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National Context Summary 
Several important features of the Tensas River Basin can 
be identified by placing the region into a national context. 
The Tensas River Basin certainly has complicated 
spatial patterns of land cover, and the finer-scale analy¬ 
ses shown later in this Atlas seem warranted. In fact, the 
Tensas River Basin should be an excellent case study 
area because of the variety of conditions that it contains. 
Some patterns in the Tensas River Basin are typical of 
other areas along the southern agricultural belt. This 
means that what is learned in the Tensas may be appli¬ 
cable in other regions in the lower Mississippi Valley. 
Because the Tensas is also a transition zone between 
regions of more or less impact to the east and west, 
further studies here may also be relevant to environmen¬ 
tal monitoring in these other areas. 
The Tensas River is not the most highly impacted water¬ 
shed in the south, but it is different from the less im¬ 
pacted areas that are found at slightly higher elevations in 
the east and west. The patterns in the watershed 
creates an opportunity to consider a full range of environ¬ 
mental strategies from restoration of the more developed 
areas to protection aimed at forests and wetlands. This 
brief look at the Tensas River Basin in a national context 
has confirmed that many aspects of the broad-scale 
view of environmental quality can be usefully explored > 
here. 
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Indicator Value 
Road - Stream Crossings 
National 
Quintile 
Tensas River Basin 
Figure 2.8 
Number of road-stream crossings per 100 kilometers of streams. 
