Data Management Plan (Deprecated)

This data set contains sensitive biological resource data for federally and/or state endangered and threatened plants, rare state plants, and sensitive ecological communities in North Carolina. Vector polygons (HABITAT POLYS) and points (HABITAT POINTS) in this data set represent federally and/or state endangered and threatened plant, rare state plant, and sensitive ecological community occurrences. Species-specific abundance, seasonality, status, life history, and source information are stored in associated data tables (described below) designed to be used in conjunction with this spatial data layer. This data set is a portion of the ESI data for North Carolina. As a whole, the ESI data characterize the marine and coastal environments and wildlife by their sensitivity to spilled oil, and include information for three main components: shoreline habitats, sensitive biological resources, and human-use resources.

This reflects the extent of all land and water features included in the overall North Carolina ESI study region. The bounding box for this particular feature class may vary depending on occurrences identified and mapped.

Process Steps:

• 2016-11-01 00:00:00 - Threatened, endangered, and rare plants and rare plant communities were mapped primarily with data from NCNHP and were given the mapping qualifier of "Vulnerable Occurrence". Critically imperiled, imperiled, and vulnerable wetland and upland plant community types were generalized as "Rare Upland Community" or "Rare Wetland Community". Wetland habitats with a high degree (greater than 60%) of overlap with the ESI wetland polygons were not included to reduce redundancy in the atlas. Plant and natural community records mapped with low or very low accuracy, as well as historical and obscure records, were also excluded. The only exception to this was that all seabeach amaranth and Virginia jointvetch (both species are state/federally threatened) were mapped regardless of location accuracy or historical status. These annual species have seedbanks and could become reestablished in historical areas under certain environmental conditions. The concentration field indicates whether the location is "Current" or "Historical". Plants with data sensitivities were masked as "Endangered Plant" and locations were buffered. Small, isolated plant polygons (less than 500 m2) were converted to points (HABITAT POINTS) so that they would be more visible in the atlas. All plant and natural community features were clipped to land except for aquatic plants blue waterhyssop and Carolina grasswort. Shoreline seapurslane, narrowleaf evening-primrose, and seabeach amaranth distributions that closely followed the shoreline were modified to correspond with the ESI shoreline. See the Lineage section for additional information on the type of source data for this data layer. The ESI, biology, and human-use data are compiled into the standard ESI digital data format. A second set of interviews with participating resource experts are conducted to review the compiled data. If necessary, edits to the HABITAT POLYS and HABITAT POINTS data layers are made based on the recommendations of the resource experts and digital data are created. (Citation: NATURAL HERITAGE ELEMENT OCCURRENCES)

Data can be accessed by downloading the zipped ArcGIS geodatabase from the Download URL (see Distribution Information). Questions can be directed to the ESI Program Manager (Point Of Contact).