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Big Woods: Ecological Significance and Threats
Bayou DeView on left. Photos © Byron Jorjorian
Ecological Significance
The Mississippi Delta. Vast, lush, primeval. Revered by author William Faulkner as “bigger and older than any recorded document,” it was an unbroken landscape of bottomland forests, swamps, bayous and rivers teeming with life. Delta forests once blanketed 24 million acres across the Southeast – the largest expanse of forested wetlands in North America. In the last two centuries, the river valley’s fertile soils have been transformed into fields of cotton, rice and soybeans, and its rivers harnessed for flood control, irrigation and navigation. Today fewer than five million forested acres remain, mostly in small, degraded patches scattered across six states. But there is still a place that exists much as it did centuries ago.
Lining the Cache, Arkansas and White rivers and Bayou DeView in eastern Arkansas, the Big Woods, at 550,000 acres, is the largest corridor of bottomland hardwood forest remaining in the Delta north of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River.
The plant and animal communities in the Big Woods are among the most biologically diverse and productive in the world. The area is made up of more than 20 distinct natural plant communities, and its rivers are home to fully 80 percent of the aquatic species in the entire Delta, including large mussel shoals and fish breeding and nursery areas. Here one can find towering cypress trees that have been growing since long before Columbus landed in the New World. Black bears – the only large, wide-ranging mammal left in the ecoregion – still roam free, and because forests have declined so severely elsewhere, a block of this size is critically important to the area’s 265 bird species, including resident and migratory songbirds, raptors and waterfowl.
Threats
The Big Woods is not an untouched nature reserve; it is a working forest and river system that has tremendous ecological, economic and cultural value. The challenge lies in finding the balance between human and ecosystem needs so that both can be sustained over the long term.
Stresses to the Big Woods ecosystem mirror those of the Mississippi Delta region as a whole. Forest fragmentation threatens mammal and bird species that depend on large, undisturbed forest blocks to survive. Rivers have been leveed, dredged, straightened, drained and diverted, disrupting their natural flooding cycles and destabilizing their channels. Water quality suffers from sediment, nutrient and biocide runoff from unsustainable agriculture and timber practices. The results of these changes are dramatic and will prove catastrophic to Delta communities and the Big Woods ecosystem alike without widespread changes in forest and water management.
