Reference Document 5-3
Appendix 5
between 20-50% by the end of the century (Butler et al. 2015) . Less snow production could lead to a less steady supply of snowmelt in the Spring. Spruce-Fir Forests and adjacent, lower-elevation Northern Hardwood Forest habitats of western North Carolina depend on snowmelt in the spring as a crucial water source. Lack of snowmelt and potential drought in the spring could lead to higher susceptibility to insects and pests and diseases, including balsam wooly adelgid that attacks Fraser fir (Darr et al. 2022) .
Increased evaporation, drought and wildfire risk
Drought is an environmental disturbance that affects freshwater aquatic invertebrates and can exacerbate other abiotic/biotic stressors to an ecosystem like invasion by nonnative species (Hodges and Magoulick 2011, Wolff et al. 2016, Yarra and Magoulick 2018) . Drought affects stream structure and function, and at the population level drought can decrease aquatic invertebrate survival and body size, and thereby fecundity (Taylor 1988; Larson et al. 2009, Rolls et al. 2012; Banha & Anastácio 2014, Magoulick 2014, Timoner et al. 2014; Osman et al. 2015) . Natural seasonal droughts are not uncommon in the Southeast, where streams become very low or dry for several months each year, leaving pools to serve as refuges for crayfish and other aquatic animals (Dekar and Magoulick 2007; Hodges and Magoulick 2011) . Naturally occurring droughts in North Carolina are projected to be more intense because higher temperatures and longer growing season lengths will increase the rate of soil moisture loss, called evapotranspiration, during dry periods (Gaertner et al. 2019; Marvel et al. 2019; Frankson et al. 2022) . Under future emission pathways, a reduction of soil moisture for the southern Appalachian Mountains is projected for the summer and fall seasons at both low and high elevations (Wu et al. 2014) . Stream crayfish have some abilities that may make them resilient to natural droughts: they are able to burrow into the hyporheic zone (a region of sediment and porous space beneath the stream channel that is the interface between the surface water and groundwater) or go through a state of summer dormancy in either damp sediment or under substrate to escape dry conditions (Jones and Bergey 2007, DiStefano et al. 2009, Kouba et al. 2016) . However, droughts are expected to increase in frequency, severity, and duration in the Southeastern U.S. in response to future climate change (Hoffman et al. 2023) . It is not well known how crayfish might respond to changes in extreme weather events like droughts and predicting the impacts of climate change on crayfishes is severely hampered by the lack of accurate distributional, ecological, and physiological data for many of North Carolina’s montane species (Taylor et al. 2019) . Red spruce and Fraser fir are likely to decline and have little recruitment due to warmer soil conditions, and therefore have a surviving old but stressed tree canopy. This means Spruce-fir Forests in North Carolina may give way to more open canopy structure as there is more red spruce and fir mortality and blowdowns. More open-canopy, in combination with drought conditions, increases the risk of wildfires to occur in the vulnerable Spruce-Fir Forest habitat. Spruce-fir Forests has little to no fire tolerance and the LANDIS model forecasts the area to experience more frequent wildlife than it has in the last 100 years (Thomas-Van Gundy and Sturtevant 2014) . Increased wildlife would kill already stressed trees and subsequent or existing open
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2025 NC Wildlife Action Plan
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