4.1 Introduction
approaches to accomplish conservation. Terefore, habitats are considered to be the sum of all the resources a species needs to survive and persist (Hall et al. 1997) . Whether they are aquatic or terrestrial systems, natural communities and the habitats they provide are highly interconnected and infuence one another. As an aid to understand- ing this complexity and to provide a landscape framework for conservation planning, it is helpful to represent broadly the distribution of important natural communities by using widely accepted ecoregional units. Ecoregions are often defned based on landscape set- tings and patterns that are infuenced by climate, soils, land surface form, and potential natural vegetation (Omernik 1987) , and can be useful for organizing, interpreting, and report- ing information about land-use dynamics (Gallant et al. 2004) . Tough North Carolina gener- ally is considered to consist of three physiographic provinces—Mountains, Piedmont, and Coastal Plain—we have used four ecoregion boundaries described by Bailey (1995, 1998, 2009) and Omernik and Grifth (2008) as a framework for the wetland and terrestrial community descriptions found in this document. Figure 4.1 provides a map of the four ecoregions used in this Plan to organize information. • Southern Blue Ridge Mountains (Mountains) . Te Mountain ecoregion includes all portions of the Southern Appalachian mountain physiographic province that are west of the Blue Ridge Escarpment. As shown in Figure 4.1, there are several foothill ranges (the Brushy, Sauratown, and South mountains) located within the Piedmont province that are part of the Mountain ecoregion. North Carolina has the highest elevations of any state east of the Mississippi River, with Mount Mitchell being the highest peak at 6,684 feet (above mean sea level) (SCO 2014) . Tis ecoregion covers about 17% of the state and is predominantly forested with small patches of agricultural and developed lands found mainly in the broad valleys.
North Carolina Ecoregions (Bailey 2009)
F IGURE 4.1
Piedmont
Blue Ridge Mountains
Coastal Plain
Sandhills
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2015 NC Wildlife Action Plan
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