Active: Piedmont Landscape Restoration

People: Tina Mozelewski, Robert Scheller

Funding: Sustainable Forestry Initiative

The Piedmont and Sandhills ecoregions of North Carolina contain some of the highest rates of biodiversity and endemism in North America. However, habitat loss and fragmentation have threatened biodiversity across the state prompting widespread engagement in dynamic, collaborative, multi-agency conservation. There is significant interest across government agencies, NGOs, and other stakeholders in identifying how to effectively reconnect the landscape and in where to invest conservation resources for the greatest return. Our goal is to help identify how conservation can shape the future of North Carolina landscapes to inform these important conservation decisions. To do this, we developed a novel approach simulating suites of spatiotemporally dynamic conservation actions using a landscape change model to test landscape-level response to conservation, providing critical information to land managers and conservation planners. Strategies assessed include clustering land acquisition and restoration around already established conservation cores, prioritizing the acquisition of geodiverse lands, and selecting the most economically efficient land for conservation.

Piedmont and Sandhills forest communities, respectively

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

This project has four parts:

1) 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 influence habitat availability, configuration, and habitat responses to management efforts.

2) 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) Sustainable forestry contributions to connectivity: We are quantifying the contribution of sustainably managed forests to landscape-level connectivity in North Carolina, a region where the timber industry is a major landholder. Sustainable forest management emphasizes a stewardship mentality that focuses not just on timber production but also on the ecosystem services forests provide, like wildlife habitat. This sets sustainably managed forests, and their respective contributions to landscape permeability, apart.

4) Conservation strategy influence on landscape-level connectivity: We are examining how restoration done under the auspices of the 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.

Study area