7.4 Habitat Monitoring
recent surveys and make detection of genuine resource trends difcult, but will improve consistency in future analyses.
Te Natural Resources Conservation Service’s (NRCS) National Resources Inventory (NRI) program collects and disseminates information on a state, regional, and national level about the status, condition, and trends of soil, water, and related resources in the United States, including land use, erosion, nonfederal and federal lands inventory, cropland use, prime farmland, and wetlands and deepwater habitats. NRI was conducted every fve years between 1977 and 1997, but since 1997, it has been conducted annually. Regional and statewide Gap Analysis Project (GAP) land cover data provides a potential source with which to assess land cover trends over time. Regional GAP eforts across the southeast (http://www.basic.ncsu.edu/segap/) do present potential opportunities for land cover change detection analyses in the future. NatureServe provides a national assessment of ecological landscape condition to model the efects of landscape fragmentation on biodiversity. Te NatureServe Modeling Landscape Condition tool produces a remote assessment index of ecological condition using available spatial data and user applied knowledge and assumptions about stressors and relative eco- logical condition for sites of interest. Data Basin is a science-based mapping and analysis platform that provides collabora- tive information for sharing and analyzing data and information. An example for North Carolina is the Southeast Aquatic Resources Partnership (SARP) Riparian Assessment (2013) data set that assesses the current condition of riparian habitat within a 30-meter bufer along streams and rivers throughout the SARP region and provides a baseline against which to measure future progress toward achieving riparian habitat conservation and restoration goals. Another example is the series of Sea Level Afecting Marshes Model (SLAMM) data sets that illustrate potential changes in marsh and coastal environments due to long-term sea level rise (SLR). Data Basin is also a resource for indicator species models being developed by SALCC. LANDFIRE is a program that provides over 20 national geo-spatial data sets for vegetation type and cover, fuel loads, and land disturbance. Vegetation is mapped using predictive landscape models based on extensive feld-referenced data, satellite imagery, and bio- physical gradient layers using classifcation and regression trees. LANDFIRE uses vegeta- tion products (i.e., NatureServe’s Ecological Systems classifcation) to create fuel and fre regimes data. Te NatureServe Explorer provides descriptions for each ecological system including species, distribution and classifcation information.
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2015 NC Wildlife Action Plan
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