By examining landscape ecology and water quality issues, this assessment provides an evaluation of the impact of current land-use practices. Because many riparian vegetation areas throughout the United States are being restored, the GIS and landscape methods developed here can be used to help make better decisions on the restoration sites, thereby enhancing environmental quality at lowest cost. The Tensas River Basin, one of 2,099 individual watersheds located across the United States, encompasses approximately 930,000 acres of Mississippi River alluvial flood plain in Northeast Louisiana. The freshwater marshes, stream bank areas, and bottomland swamps of the Tensas River Basin have been under strong development pressures. Large portions of forest near streams and in backwater swamp areas have been converted to agriculture.
Land cover is the product of past land uses on the backdrop of the biophysical setting.
A map of land cover is essentially a picture of the dominant vegetative, water, or urban cover in an area. The images of land cover in the Tensas River Basin for 1972 and 1991 are based primarily on images taken by the Landsat Multispectral Scanner satellite since the early 1970s. Although individual pixels are far too small to be rendered accurately here, the visual impression of broadscale regional patterns is readily apparent. Forest vegetation shows up on the image as red in color, agriculture shows up as light red, grey, light blue and white and almost always shows a pattern with rows or right angles typical of farm fields. The data in these images were then used to categorize land use.