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

The goal of this project is to provide projections of 21st century landscape change (to year 2100) by expanding the geographic and taxonomic scope of the existing research throughout the SAMBI region and into the Southern Piedmont. This will allow for the development of the core datasets and tools needed for effective Strategic Habitat Conservation (SHC) decision-making across the entire SALCC region. These datasets include projections of climate change, urbanization, ecosystem disturbance processes, land cover (habitat) dynamics and management scenarios; species-habitat models for representative species including habitat affinity models and occupancy models using current and projected future landscape conditions to predict persistence of species under future conditions; and decision support tools using habitat data layers from Regional Gap Analysis and species-habitat models to target and optimize habitat conservation for a single wildlife species, multiple wildlife species using similar habitats or multiple species using multiple habitats in a diverse, dynamic landscape using limited resources.