Chapter 3 Species
Addendum 2
3.15 Plants
T he term “habitat” is used in this Wildlife Action Plan to describe the natural communities and their components that sustain individual plants and animals, discrete populations, or taxonomic groups. Habitats are considered the sum of all the resources a species needs to survive and persist (Hall et al. 1997) and are made up of many biotic and abiotic components that are too numerous and diverse to describe in this document. Many, if not most, of the terrestrial natural communities in North Carolina are composed primarily of plants and, depending on the natural community type, composition will include a range of woody trees, shrubs, herbs and forbs, grasses, non-vascular plants, and composite organisms. Further, plants are fundamental elements of wildlife habitat, providing food, shelter, sites for reproduction, structures for resting and hunting, and often much more, depending on the species or taxonomic group. For example, many wildlife species, such as insect pollinators, butterflies, and moths, are adapted to rely on specific host plants to complete their life cycle. Since plants are rooted within their landscape position, they are at greater risk to direct impacts from threats when compared to wildlife that are better able to move across the landscape to other areas. Considering this, it is important to support conservation of North Carolina’s native plants considered to be Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN) to preserve genetic diversity and seed sources, especially those limited to small, isolated, or fragmented populations. This Addendum 2 to the 2015 Plan is submitted as a major revision to add plant SGCN as a component of the natural communities described in Chapter 4 Habitats. A new natural community description for Piedmont and Coastal Plain Oak Forests is added to Section 4.4 Terrestrial Communities. This community type has been added to the new Appendix HA-2, which provides habitat associations for plant SGCN.
3.15.1 Introduction
The North Carolina Natural Heritage Program (NCNHP) maintains a statewide inventory of native plant species that are rare, in decline, believed to have been extirpated, or presumed extinct. The inventory is maintained with current data and an updated Rare Plant List is published every two years, making it easy to compare the level of current knowledge about a species ’ conservation status over a relatively short time frame. The most recent version of the
2022 Addendum 2 NC Wildlife Action Plan
3A2-1
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