Active: Changes Across Piedmont Forests

People:  Louis Goodall, Robert Scheller,  Tina Mozelewski, 

Funding:  Sustainable Forestry Initiative, USDA McIntire-Stennis

The Piedmont and Sandhills ecoregions of North Carolina contain some of the highest rates of biodiversity and endemism in North America. However, climate change, habitat loss, and fragmentation threaten biodiversity and other important ecosystem services across the region. There is significant interest across government agencies, NGOs, and other stakeholders in identifying how to effectively manage this landscape. Our goal is to assess how conservation and forest management can shape the future of Piedmont landscapes and to inform important conservation landscape management decisions. To do this, we have and are currently simulating suites of spatiotemporally dynamic management actions using a landscape change model to test landscape-level response to range of futures, including a changing climate, changing forest management, and evolving conservation decisions.  Our goal is to provide critical information to land managers and conservation planners. 

Piedmont and Sandhills forest communities, respectively

(Photos: South Atlantic LCC and Nat. Park Service)

This project spans multiple projects, including:

1) Assessing landscape and forest change in central North Carolina: We are forecasting the influence of climate and land use changes on North Carolina landscapes over the next century to better understand how these changes will a broad suite of ecosystem services.  We are assessing how management actions, including harvesting and conservation, can lead to more positive outcomes across the landscape.

2) Assessing conservation velocity: We are assessing the rate at which the conservation actions simulated move towards their intended conservation targets, a metric called conservation velocity. Conservation demand continues to outpace the conservation resources available. Identifying which conservation actions reach their targets the fastest could be an important consideration in conservation action prioritization.

3) Conservation strategy influence on landscape-level connectivity: We are examining how restoration done under the auspices of different conservation strategies simulated improves landscape connectivity and assessing whether conservation can keep pace with the fragmenting effects of climate and land use change. Using network analysis, we're tracking changes in connectivity over time to identify which strategies result in the greatest improvements and where the biggest obstacles to connected landscapes will lie in the future.

4) Forecasting the effects of climate change and hurricanes on rare habitat:  

Study area