Appendix 5
Reference Document 5-2
shared conservation action to connect lands and waters and improve ecosystem health. The Blueprint includes more than 60 indicators that represent both natural and cultural resources and collectively represent ecosystem health, function, and connectivity across terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal and marine systems. Examples include imperiled aquatic SGCN, cores of intact natural habitat, natural floodplain landcover, prescribed fire frequency, and more. Indicator data is available on the Blueprint page of the SECAS Atlas. The Blueprint recognizes the vast majority (94%) of North Carolina’s protected areas as a priority for connecting the lands and waters of the Southeast (Table 1). This means that while these conserved areas are contributing to the state-wide landscape and represent unique habitats and locally important areas, many of them are also contributing to a wider regional conservation strategy. The State’s conservation portfolio exemplifies a complementary landscape-scale approach to conservation that links local actions with conservation outcomes that contribute to a broader geographic scale. The Southeast Blueprint also includes a least-cost path connectivity analysis that identifies corridors that link coastal and inland areas and span climate gradients (Figure 3). The corridors connect hubs across the shortest distance possible, while also routing through as much Blueprint priority as possible. The hubs that anchor the connectivity analysis are large patches of highest priority Blueprint areas and/or protected lands. About 11.8 million acres (34%) within North Carolina are considered a hub or corridor, providing many conservation opportunities to support species movement and migration—an important strategy for helping wildlife adapt to landscape-level changes (Figure 3). Ensuring landscape connectivity across jurisdictional boundaries is becoming increasingly important for species management as changes in land use, climate, and weather patterns shift species distributions. Collaborating with the neighboring states of Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina to identify cross- boundary species migration and habitat pathways can increase regional connectivity for state SGCN and RSGCN. It is also important to consider potential barriers to connectivity such as existing and future urbanization. Figure 4 represents places in the State that are already considered urban as well as places that are predicted to urbanize by 2060. One lens to characterize the landscape of North Carolina is by its ecoregions as defined by Bailey's ecoregions and subregions of the U.S. including Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (Bailey 2016). This classification draws on climatic gradients based on temperature and precipitation, vegetation natural land covers, and terrain (Bailey 2016). Ultimately, ecoregions are identified by analyzing areas where ecosystems are generally similar. North Carolina’s Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP) defines its ecoregions based on this framework and they include the Blue Ridge, Piedmont, Sandhills, and the Middle Atlantic Coastal Plain, ecoregions (Figure 5). Evaluating ecoregions that North Carolina shares with its neighbors is one way to identify cross- boundary conservation opportunities, as these areas share similar mosaics of biotic, abiotic, terrestrial, and aquatic ecosystems. Table 2 shows the ecoregions of North Carolina and its shared watersheds, as well as how much of each ecoregion within North Carolina is prioritized in the Southeast Blueprint (Table 2). In particular, the Blue Ridge and Middle Atlantic Coastal Plain within North Carolina significantly contribute to the Blueprint.
2025 NC Wildlife Action Plan
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