5.3 Residential and Commercial Development
Information about emerging issues and concerns is also discussed in this chapter. Finding solutions to specifc conservation problems will have as much to do with addressing these overarching issues as it will with addressing more immediate sources of the problems. Many categories of threats to wildlife are also general activities that can be important to the economic wellbeing of our state. It is important to work collaboratively so that ecosys- tem stewardship and economic goals are not mutually exclusive. As previously noted, the threat categories addressed in this chapter are based on the def- nitions and hierarchical classifcation scheme published by Salafsky et al. (2008) with modi- fcations. Tese threats were incorporated into the species evaluation and ranking process as Metrics 9 and 14 and were used by the eight Taxa Teams as part of the WAP revision process. Te Taxa Teams applied Metric 9 to gauge the scope and severity of the threat impacts to fsh and wildlife as part of the Conservation Concern evaluation process. Metric 14 was applied to assess and rank the importance of the threat as a research topic as part of the Knowledge Gap evaluation process. Metrics 9 and 14 are incorporated in this chapter without additional analysis beyond Taxa Team consideration. Te evaluation metrics are described in a white paper provided in Appendix F. Complete results from the Taxa Team evaluations are available in Appendix G. 5.3 Residential and Commercial Development For this discussion, development includes housing and urban areas, com- mercial and industrial areas, and tourism and recreation areas that have a substantial footprint. (Salafsky et al. 2008) Te US Geological Survey (USGS) suggests that the threat to ecosystems from development patterns and current practices in the Southeast rivals threats from climate change (Terando et al . 2014) . Habitat degradation and fragmentation arising from sprawling development pat- terns are some of the most signifcant causes of species imperilment in the United States (Brown and Laband 2006; Doyle et al. 2001; Ewing et al. 2005) . Encroachment of major development adja- cent to existing conserved lands and within high-quality wildlife corridors is of particular concern due to the need to maintain the integrity of protected habitats and the ability of wildlife and plants to disperse across the landscape. In addition to the land use and habitat fragmentation that are common to any type of development, manufacturing and industrial facilities can also be a source of air, water, and noise pollution that can disrupt natural wildlife activities. Urbanized land can have a disproportionate efect on freshwater stream health, with estimates indicating urbanized basins can impair as much as three times the length of stream impacts when compared to stream impacts from agricultural land uses (Smoot et al. 2004) .
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2015 NC Wildlife Action Plan
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