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South Atlantic Coastal Plain
(Area - 24,660,800 ha)
Description - The South Atlantic Coastal Plain covers
northeastern Florida, the southern half of Georgia and the eastern halves of South
Carolina and North Carolina. Its western boundary is the fall line that marks the
beginning of the hilly Piedmont and its eastern boundary is the Atlantic Ocean. As part of
a continuous Coastal Plain that extends from New York to Texas, it has arbitrary
boundaries at the Alabama-Georgia border and at the North Carolina-Virginia border,
extending into the southeast corner of Virginia only to capture the very Southeastern
Great Dismal Swamp. The southeastern boundary marks a broad transitional zone into
Peninsular Florida. The Atlantic coast is lined with barrier islands that support sand
dune and maritime forest habitats and are backed by marshland. Estuaries are less saline
marsh nearest the coast, and river valleys become increasingly wooded farther inland,
supporting significant areas of bottomland hardwood forest. Pocosins and Carolina bays are
non-alluvial forested wetlands unique to this physiographic area. Uplands were
historically dominated by fire-maintained pine forests, with longleaf nearer the coast and
on sandy soils inland and a mixture of shortleaf, loblolly, and hardwoods elsewhere.
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Conservation recommendations and needs - As in other pine-dominated upland parts of the Southeast, fire suppression and conversion to other land uses and short-rotation pine plantation has significantly altered the nature of the South Atlantic Coastal Plain. Maintenance or restoration of large tracts of fire-maintained pine savannah is the key to health of high priority pine and pine-grassland bird species, most notably the Red-cockaded Woodpecker. Pine plantations have some wildlife value, and maintenance of a diversity of age classes over landscapes can help maintain many bird species, including some that are of reasonably high priority.
The bottomland hardwood bird community requires large tracts of forest in river systems including the Roanoke, Pee Dee, Savannah, and Altamaha. Wayne’s subspecies of the Black-throated Green Warbler is limited to these areas, which also support significant numbers of breeding Swallow-tailed Kites. Maintenance and restoration of perhaps 30 large patches of bottomland forest in this physiographic area should assure the health of these birds.
Coastal maritime forest and scrub-shrub habitats not only support most of the eastern population of Painted Bunting but also are extremely important for in-transit migrants. Much of this forest has been developed for intensive human use, and what remains should be maintained.
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