An Ecological Assessment of the Louisiana Tensas River Basin Chapter 7 
Chapter 1: Taking a Broader View 
The Gulf of Mexico Program is working with its partners 
including U.S. EPA Regions 4,5,6, and 7 to identify ap¬ 
proaches to reduce nutrients in the surface waters of the 
Mississippi River System. The problem is being ad¬ 
dressed at the scale of the larger watershed (Mississippi 
River System). This report reflects the Landscape 
Ecology research done to characterize changing land¬ 
scape patterns as they relate to potential changes in 
nutrient loading for one river basin. This approach can be 
refined and applied to other watersheds within the Missis¬ 
sippi River System. 
Environmental quality is important to everyone. It affects 
our health, our quality of life, the sustainability of our 
economies, and the futures of our children. Yet pres¬ 
sures from an increasing population coupled with the 
need for economic development and an improved 
standard of living often result in multiple impacts on our 
natural resources. And, just as a person with a less- 
than-healthy life style is more prone to infection, a 
weakened ecosystem is less able to withstand additional 
stress. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to see these 
changes in environmental quality because they occur 
slowly or at scales we do not normally consider. 
There is growing public, legal, and scientific awareness 
that broader-scale views are important when assessing 
regional environmental quality. In the past, media 
attention has focused on dramatic events, focusing our 
environmental awareness on local or isolated phenom¬ 
ena such as cleaning up Superfund sites, stopping 
pollution from a drainage pipe, saving individual endan¬ 
gered species, or choosing a site for a parish landfill. In 
an era of environmental legislation, monitors of environ¬ 
mental quality responded to legal standards, like those 
for drinking water or air quality, and as a result they 
reported very narrow views of the environment. Given 
this view of the world, scientists studied fine-scale model 
systems and considered humans to be external factors. 
Today, our perceptions are changing. We realize that 
humans and our actions are an integral part of the 
global ecosystem, and that the environment is compli¬ 
cated and interconnected with human activities across 
local and regional scales. We have begun to take a 
broader view of the world and of our place in natural 
systems. 
Technology has advanced in ways that make it easier to 
obtain new views of overall environmental quality. 
Larger patterns and processes can be studied by using 
computers and satellites. These technologies, com¬ 
bined with a better understanding of how the pieces fit 
together, help to understand where we are now with 
regard to environmental quality, where we hope to be in 
the future, and what steps need to be taken to get there. 
This atlas takes advantage of some of these technolo¬ 
gies in assessing environmental conditions over the 
Tensas River Basin of Louisiana. 
Just as we now watch broad-scale weather patterns to 
get an idea of whether it will rain in the next few days, we 
can develop a better assessment of current environmen¬ 
tal conditions by combining regional and local-scale 
information. Broad-scale weather patterns are important 
because they affect and constrain what happens locally 
on any given day. By taking a broader view of the environ¬ 
ment, or widening our perspective about how the environ¬ 
ment is put together, it becomes easier to see where 
changes occur and to anticipate future problems before 
they materialize. 
Bottom-land Hardwood forest of the Tensas River Basin. 
