Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: North Carolina
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

The USGS North Carolina Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit (NCCFWRU) has an ongoing partnership with the federal government on developing, analyzing and implementing Gap Analysis datasets starting with the NC-GAP Project in 1996 up through to the first completed data set for the contiguous United States in 2016. The focus of the next phase of effort will be in three areas: development of analyses to better understand the state of national biodiversity of aquatic and terrestrial communities, refinement of our data infrastructure to allow seamless updates of data products, and continued development of outreach tools to better facilitate the implementation of our data in conservation assessments. Additional research efforts will incorporate species occurrence data to assess and inform predicted distributions, assess the impact of dam removal on fish communities, incorporate Forest Inventory and Analysis plot data in the refinement of habitat availability, map patterns of species’ turnover and identify common drivers of habitat quality across terrestrial and aquatic vertebrate species.