Chapter 6 Conservation Goals and Priorities
6.2.3.7 USGS State Wildlife Action Plans The US Geological Survey (USGS) provides national information about State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP) publications data and guidance. For example, the website provides a national database that compiles all the SGCN lists from 56 states, United States territories, and districts, encompassing action plans spanning from 2005 to 2022. A list of SGCN data can also be downloaded for use in Microsoft Excel formats. Online at https://www.usgs.gov/search?keywords=State+Wildlife+Action+Plans. 6.3 Conservation Opportunities and Incentives Successful wildlife habitat conservation ultimately involves effective partnerships forged among private landowners, public land managers, local governments, developers, and transportation and development planners. Strong partnerships among agencies, organizations, academics, and industries are critical to implementing these strategies and actions, both statewide and in regional settings. Examples of objectives, strategies, and priority actions to achieve the goals outlined in this chapter are provided for these measures. The conservation issues, strategies, and actions discussed in this section represent only a fraction of North Carolina’s conservation needs and are intended to be a starting point for discussions about how best to accomplish wildlife and habitat conservation in the state. 6.3.1 Conservation Opportunity Areas Conservation Opportunity Areas (COAs) are areas predicted to contain the least amount of protected habitat for an ecoregion or natural community and serve as priority areas for conservation action to sustain Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN). COAs are a non- regulatory tool to rally partners around places expected to be resilient to changing climate conditions and capable of supporting multiple co-benefits. An early step in identifying COAs is to identify appropriate Geographic Information System (GIS) data and establishing modeling analysis parameters that include SGCN occurrences. 6.3.1.1 2015 Conservation Opportunity Areas Addendum 1 to the 2015 NC SWAP was published in 2020 and incorporated newly developed decision support tools (DST) intended to identify where conservation actions could provide the greatest benefits to SGCN and their habitats. The COA tool identified areas predicted to contain the least amount of protected habitat for an ecoregion and natural community of interest selected by the user. The top five areas from the analysis results were depicted on a map using HUC12 boundaries. Terrestrial COAs corresponded to the natural community descriptions in Chapter 4 Habitats. Aquatic COAs corresponded to aquatic natural communities and were organized by river basins. Natural community COA boundaries were defined using 12-digit HUC polygons. Riparian buffer COAs were defined using a 1 km boundary along the main stem of several large river systems.
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2025 NC Wildlife Action Plan
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