Chapter 3 North Carolina’s Species
3.13 Plants The term “habitat” is used throughout this SWAP to describe the natural communities and their components that sustain individual plants and animals, discrete populations, or taxonomic groups. Habitats are considered the sum of all the resources a species needs to survive and persist (Hall et al. 1997) and are made up of many biotic and abiotic components that are too numerous and diverse to describe in this document. Many, if not most, of the terrestrial natural communities in North Carolina are composed primarily of plants and, depending on the natural community type, composition will include a range of woody trees, shrubs, herbs and forbs, grasses, non-vascular plants, and composite organisms. Further, plants are fundamental elements of wildlife habitat, providing food, shelter, sites for reproduction, structures for resting and hunting, and often much more, depending on the species or taxonomic group. For example, many wildlife species, such as insect pollinators, butterflies, and moths, are adapted to rely on specific host plants to complete their life cycle. Since plants are rooted within their landscape position, they are at greater risk to direct impacts from threats when compared to wildlife that are better able to move across the landscape to other areas. Considering this, it is important to support conservation of North Carolina’s native plants considered to be Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN) to preserve genetic diversity and seed sources, especially those limited to small, isolated, or fragmented populations. 3.13.1 Introduction The North Carolina Natural Heritage Program (NCNHP) maintains a statewide inventory of native plant species that are rare, in decline, believed to have been extirpated, or presumed extinct. The inventory is maintained with current data, and an updated Rare Plant List is published every two years, making it easy to compare the level of current knowledge about a species’ conservation status over a relatively short time frame. The most recent version of the Rare Plant List (NCNHP 2024) lists over 4,900 native plant species for the state. The majority of these are vascular plants, with the remainder including non-vascular and composite organisms that are lichens, mosses, liverworts, and hornworts. Approximately 18% of the native plant species occurring in North Carolina are tracked by the NCNHP as state listed endangered, threatened, special concern, or significantly rare, indicating the need for high conservation concern for these rare and at-risk plant species. In most cases, common names are used throughout this document to identify a species. Exceptions include pest species and species for which there is taxonomic uncertainty or when common practice is to use a form of the scientific name as the common name; in those instances, the scientific name may be used to identify the species. Scientific names for all plant SGCN are provided in Table 3-11 in Appendix 3.
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2025 NC Wildlife Action Plan
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