The Abemarle-Pamlico Peninsula
The Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula (APP) in eastern North Carolina is a 6000 square kilometer rural landscape comprised mostly of forested wetlands, herbaceous wetlands, upland pine forests, row-crop agriculture, and blackwater creeks. The peninsula is surrounded by the second largest estuarine complex in North America, which is buffered from the Atlantic Ocean by a chain of barrier islands. Though >50% of the peninsula is comprised of wetlands, the extant freshwater and brackish wetlands are only a small remnant of the historical wetlands existing prior to timber extraction in the 19th and 20th centuries and large-scale conversion to agriculture beginning in the 1970s.
The rural context of the APP results in a strong connection between stakeholders and the environmental resources of the region. Forestry and agriculture are the principal economies of the region, though industries related to fishing, hunting, and tourism are also important. In addition, unlike most other areas of the southeastern US, population growth on the APP is expected to be minimal in the coming decades. As such, the future of these already economically distressed populations promises to be strongly dependent on changes in natural resources and their associated ecosystem services.
Over half of the peninsula is less than 1.5 meters above sea level, which exposes the people and natural resources of the region to impacts of SLR. Preceding inundation is episodic incursion of saline waters into the APPs freshwater ecosystems and agricultural lands, altering the ecosystem structure along drainage canals. Against this backdrop of climate-driven landscape change, stakeholders in the region have identified ecotourism as a key economic development initiative. Yet we know already that climate-related changes to natural systems can affect nature-based tourism demand and consequently tourism-dependent communities through physical alterations and visitor perceptions of risk and uncertainty associated with climate and ecological impacts. At the same time, working forests on the APP are under pressure to convert to, or manage for, bioenergy products, driven largely by overseas demand for wood pellets. Here, too, we know that salinization of working forests and consequent productivity losses are key concerns of stakeholders in the region. This combination of sea level rise vulnerability and a local economy inherently linked to natural resources and environmental processes makes the APP a representative model of the impacts of climate change on low-lying coastal regions.
The rural context of the APP results in a strong connection between stakeholders and the environmental resources of the region. Forestry and agriculture are the principal economies of the region, though industries related to fishing, hunting, and tourism are also important. In addition, unlike most other areas of the southeastern US, population growth on the APP is expected to be minimal in the coming decades. As such, the future of these already economically distressed populations promises to be strongly dependent on changes in natural resources and their associated ecosystem services.
Over half of the peninsula is less than 1.5 meters above sea level, which exposes the people and natural resources of the region to impacts of SLR. Preceding inundation is episodic incursion of saline waters into the APPs freshwater ecosystems and agricultural lands, altering the ecosystem structure along drainage canals. Against this backdrop of climate-driven landscape change, stakeholders in the region have identified ecotourism as a key economic development initiative. Yet we know already that climate-related changes to natural systems can affect nature-based tourism demand and consequently tourism-dependent communities through physical alterations and visitor perceptions of risk and uncertainty associated with climate and ecological impacts. At the same time, working forests on the APP are under pressure to convert to, or manage for, bioenergy products, driven largely by overseas demand for wood pellets. Here, too, we know that salinization of working forests and consequent productivity losses are key concerns of stakeholders in the region. This combination of sea level rise vulnerability and a local economy inherently linked to natural resources and environmental processes makes the APP a representative model of the impacts of climate change on low-lying coastal regions.