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Major Land Resource Area or ecological site by name and/or ID.
General information
Provisional. A provisional ecological site description has undergone quality control and quality assurance review. It contains a working state and transition model and enough information to identify the ecological site.
MLRA notes
Major Land Resource Area (MLRA): 133A–Southern Coastal Plain
This MLRA (shown in orange in the figure above) is in Alabama (26 percent), Mississippi (24 percent), Georgia (21 percent), Florida (8 percent), North Carolina (7 percent), Virginia (5 percent), South Carolina (4 percent), Tennessee (4 percent), and Louisiana (1 percent). It makes up about 106,485 square miles (275,930 square kilometers). It is the largest MLRA in the U.S. The city of Alexandria, Virginia, is at the northernmost tip of the area. The MLRA also includes Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Petersburg, Virginia; Rocky Mount, Goldsboro, Fayetteville, and Lumberton, North Carolina; Florence, Sumter, and Orangeburg, South Carolina; Albany and Tifton, Georgia; Tallahassee, Florida; Tuskegee, Eufaula, Selma, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Savannah, Tennessee; Corinth, Starkville, Grenada, Meridian, Hattiesburg, and McComb, Mississippi; and Bogalusa, Louisiana. Interstates 95, 64, 85, 40, 20, 20/59, 26, 16, 75, 10, 65, 59, and 55 cross this area from north to south. This area extends from Virginia to Louisiana and Mississippi, but it is almost entirely within three sections of the Coastal Plain Province of the Atlantic Plain. The northern part is in the Embayed Section, the middle part is in the Sea Island Section, and the southern part is in the East Gulf Coastal Plain Section. This MLRA is strongly dissected into nearly level and gently undulating valleys and gently sloping to steep uplands. Stream valleys generally are narrow in their upper reaches but become broad and have widely meandering stream channels as they approach the coast. Elevation ranges from 80 to 655 feet (25 to 200 meters), increasing gradually from the lower Coastal Plain northward. Local relief is mainly 10 to 20 feet (3 to 6 meters), but it is 80 to 165 feet (25 to 50 meters) in some of the more deeply dissected areas.
Classification relationships
ATTENTION: This ecological site meets the requirements for PROVISIONAL. A provisional ecological site is established after ecological site concepts are developed and an initial state-and-transition model is drafted. A provisional ecological site typically will include literature reviews, land use history information, legacy data, and must include some soils data, ocular estimates for canopy and/or species composition by weight, and some line-point intercept information. A provisional ecological site provides the conceptual framework of soil-site correlation for the development of the ESD. For more information about this ecological site, please contact your local NRCS office.
Table 1. Dominant plant species
Tree (1) Chamaecyparis thyoides
Shrub Not specified
Herbaceous Not specified
