4.2 Aquatic Communities
duration) and fooded lands may periodically require updating food maps to ensure protection of life and property (Band and Salvesen, 2009).
• Preserve forests and open space, farm land, rural landscapes, and park lands. Manage open lands and plant trees and vegetation in urban areas to aid in carbon sequestration. • Plant riparian areas with vegetation with a broad elevational range within a particu- lar watershed and with broad hydrologic tolerance to promote resiliency from climate change.
• Use easements and value taxation, and fee simple purchase for land conservation or preservation.
• Promote eforts to control stormwater management and point source pollution.
• Land use planning and zoning laws are needed to guide development, land clearing activities, and hydrology alterations within foodplains. Planning such as this may for example route highways and other corridors that cross foodplains as closely as possible to existing corridors to avoid fragmenting an extensive corridor of forest.
4.2.3 Coldwater Streams 4.2.3.1 Ecosystem Description
Coldwater habitats can be found in diferent sized streams in the Mountain and Piedmont ecoregions and in springs or groundwater-fed systems found in all ecoregions of the state. Often the streams are headwaters, but the upper portions of some small and medium river systems can have coldwater habitats, particularly if they are infuenced by cooling water discharges from hydropower facilities or efuent discharges from industrial processes. Te coldwater designation is based upon two general principles: temperature regime and fsh community structure. When used to classify coldwater streams, the temperature regimes of summer water temperatures typically do not exceed 20 degrees Celsius (°C) [68 degrees Fahrenheit (°F)]. Tis is a suggested temperature that will usually support a cold- water fsh community structure that includes salmonid species (e.g., trout species) (USACE 2003) . For migrating salmonids in the Pacifc northwest, the EPA recommends a 7-day aver- age daily maximum water temperature of 20°C (EPA 2012a) . McCullough et al. (2009) suggest 22°C–23°C as a threshold for juvenile salmonid species. A review of research literature seems to indicate the need for availability of a temperature gradient appropriate to support difering size, age, and possibly sex of the species.
Whether the seasonal and daily variation of water temperature is natural or induced, the temperature will infuence the distribution of aquatic species in this aquatic system (Caissie
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2015 NC Wildlife Action Plan
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