Ecosystems of the southeastern United States face a large number of threats to their ecological integrity, including loss of habitat, climate change, exotic species invasion, and many more. NatureServe staff, in conjunction with the South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (SALCC), have compiled this report in order to better understand how these threats impact ecosystems and the level of impact to these ecosystems, thereby addressing a key information need identified by the SALCC. We have organized the threats according to the first and second level threats classification of the Conservation Measures Partnership (Salafsky et al. 2008). The Conservation Measures Partnership maintains a standard nomenclature of conservation terms to promote effective conservation, and this nomenclature is widely used for conservation projects in the United States and internationally. We then developed and refined a list of all ecosystems within the SALCC footprint using NatureServe’s Ecological Systems; a standard vegetation classification system. Ecological Systems are mid‐scale ecological community classification units developed by NatureServe, which incorporate similar vegetation, environmental site characteristics and disturbances (Comer et al. 2003). Ecological Systems have been used as land cover mapping units regionally in the southeastern United States by the USGS GAP Analysis Program, nationally by the interagency Landfire program, and by NatureServe via its National Map of Ecological Systems, which is a seamless combination of GAP and Landfire datasets. The footprint of the study area is the South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative area, which includes the Piedmont and Coastal Plain of the southeastern United States, from southern Virginia to northern Florida, east of the Apalachicola River. It includes most of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia (Figure 1).
NatureServe used standard methods to assign threats information to the Ecological Systems of the project area, following NatureServe’s Global Status Review process (Faber‐Langendoen et al. 2012, Master et al. 2012). As part of the 2012 study, we identified over 1200 combinations of level one and two threats to specific ecological systems in the region. In 2012, we assigned each threat to an Ecological System with a threat impact level specific to that Ecological System, from low to high or very high (Master et al. 2012). Highly and very highly threatened Ecological Systems are influenced by a large number of threats, and these threats tend to have high and very high threat impacts. We highlight the fourteen Ecological Systems documented as the most highly threatened in this report and its appendices.
