North Carolina Coastal

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Habitat Protection Plan
An Excerpt: A publication of NCDENR

North Carolina is home to a tremendous variety of fish and shellfish largely because the state has such a greatdiversity of habitat where those animals feed, spawn and grow. About 2.5 million acres of coastal and marine waters are spawning and nursery grounds for most of the state’s important fish species and many that migrate along the East Coast.Commercial and recreational fisheries contribute a billion dollars a year to the economy of North Carolina and have long been considered an inexhaustible resource. Even though the state is among the top 10 seafood producers in the country, increasing pressures on coastal and marine habitats, including habitat loss and degradation and poor water quality, have jeopardized our fisheries.

Important fish habitats provide the basic needs of fish and shellfish, including food, shelter and places to reproduce and grow. The N.C. coast includes almost 4,000 miles of estuarine shoreline, with a wide range of habitats. Whether it is a freshwater swamp, a salt marsh or a mud flat, these habitats all play a vital role in sustaining our fisheries.

State legislators, recognizing the need to protect such special places, passed the Fisheries Reform Act in 1997. The law contains the directive to protect and enhance coastal habitats that are critical to coastal fisheries. To achieve that ambitious goal, the law requires the cooperation of three state regulatory commissions. The Environmental Management, the Coastal Resources and the Marine Fisheries commissions must work together to prepare and adopt a plan to protect and restore these critical habitats and to implement the plan.

The N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries has been assigned the task of formulating what’s known as the Coastal Habitat Protection Plan, or CHPP. It has been working since 1999 with several other state and federal agencies on the framework of the plan, a sort of broad-brush examination of the six critical marine habitats coast-wide.

Below is one of the six critical marine habitats in need of protection:

Underwater Grasses: Gardens Nurture Young of Many Species
They clean the water, provide a haven for young fish and are food for dozens of different birds and sea creatures. These small plants that grow mostly unseen beneath the water help keep North Carolina’s coastal waters healthy.

The Benefits
This underwater garden is an important part of the coastal ecosystem. The plants are topnotch recyclers, for instance. They take nutrients such as phosphorous and nitrogen from the sediment and release them into the water when they die.

Decomposed plant matter and its associated bacteria are actually more important food for fish than the living plant leaves. The decomposed plants are food for shrimp, bacteria and fungi, which in turn are eaten by larger animals. Geese and many kinds of ducks depend on the living leaves, roots and other parts of the plants.

More than 40 different species of fish and invertebrates have been collected from grass beds, which are busy nurseries for young croaker, spot, mullet, red drum, flounder, blue crabs and pink shrimp. Grass shrimp, spotted seatrout and weakfish spawn in the grass, and bay scallops need grass meadows to survive.
Plant beds also tend to reduce shoreline erosion by sheltering the land from waves. They also help cleanse the water, their leaves acting as screens to remove sediment.

The Trends
North Carolina has about 200,000 acres of sea grass beds. Only Florida at 2.7 million acres has more along the East Coast. Recent surveys show that the beds that grow in water of high-salinity appear stable. In fact, most of the state’s grass beds grow in the sandy and muddy sediment and high-salinity waters on the landward side of the Outer Banks. However, plants that prefer brackish water have undergone some dramatic changes and shifts.

Though there is little scientific information about the past abundance of submerged plants, old timers and fishermen’s journals from the late 1800s describe extensive beds of grasses in many bays along the mainland where there are none today. Such anecdotal evidence suggests that as much as half of the beds along the mainland side of the state’s sounds are gone.

In the upper half of the Pamlico River, for instance, grass beds were common until the mid-1970s. Fifteen years later, those beds have decreased 99 percent. Wild celery(Vallisnaria americana) was historically abundant in western Pamlico Sound and, to a lesser extent, in the Neuse River, with pond weeds (Potamogeton spp.) and widgeon grass also common. The plants in those areas declined significantly during the mid-1980s and then rebounded modestly.

The Threats
The reasons for the historic decline are many. Natural events, such as regional shifts in salinity because of drought or excessive rainfall, animal foraging, storms or disease all play a role.

Other factors may be more significant, however. Dredging channels for navigation or marinas can destroy sea grasses by removing them of covering them with sediment. Docks built over seagrass beds can shade them out. Boat propellers can sheer off plants or dig them up by their roots, as can some types of fishing gear, such as oyster or clam dredges.

Those kinds of physical damage tend to occur in specific areas and at certain times of the year. Degraded water quality, however, can affect grass beds over larger areas and longer periods of time. Like any plant, the grasses need light to grow. Too much sediment in the water can block sunlight from reaching the plants. Water enriched with too many nutrients can trigger algal blooms, which have the same effect. The sediments and nutrients come from many sources: wastewater treatment plants, eroding stream banks, rural and urban stormwater.

Runoff can also increase the amount of freshwater entering the estuaries, which can decrease salinity and affect the plants.

Matt Flint, NRCS Biologist February 2001Contacts: Jeff Raifsnider NRCS Public Affairs Specialist, 919-873-2160, or Matt Flint, NRCS Biologist, 919-873-2124