The Blue Ridge Mountains is just a tiny area in the northeast corner of the state and represents a the most eastern range of the Appalachian Mountains.įor more about SC mammals (including Latin names), click on individual animal links or for another (off-site) resource: South Carolina's mammals. There is also blueberry, huckleberry, and mountain laurel. Other trees include hophornbeam, sassafras, hawthorn, and flowering dogwood as well as some sugar maple, shirtless pine and loblolly pine. The temperate forests here are southeastern mixed forests of oak-hickory. The Fall Line marks its eastern boundary with the Coastal Plain.

The Piedmont (or foothills) is a plateau of rolling hills and thin, rocky, clay soils that stand between the Coastal Plain and the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Atlantic Seaboard Fall Line is a long cliff (900-miles long) that runs parallel to the coastline and marks where the Piedmont and Coastal Plain region come together. Inland, the Sandhill region shows dunes from millions of years ago where the coast was once located. South Carolina's coastal and interior wetlands provide important habitat for mallards, green-winged teals, ring-necked ducks, northern pintails, wood ducks, and other waterfowl. South Carolina provides important winter habitat for waterfowl that are traveling south along the Atlantic Flyway from the northern prairies, Great Lakes and eastern Canada. Another wet habitat found here are the pocosins which are flat, wet, shrubby areas. Cypress swamps and cedar swamps have trees and plants adapted to 'wet feet' - like water oak, willow oak, swamp chestnut oak, pawpaw and swamp tupelo. Many wetland habitats thrive in the Middle Atlantic coastal forests like freshwater marshes, bogs, swamps, and wet hammocks. Saw palmetto, southern bayberry, sweetly, common persimmon, Carolina holly and Spanish moss are also common. Some of the hardwoods that are intermixed in the forest are turkey oak, myrtle oak, Spanish oak, live oak and southern catalpa. These temperate coniferous forests are made up of mixed pine-oak forests - dominated by with long leaf pine, but also home to loblolly and shortleaf pines. Inland are the Middle Atlantic coastal forests. The coastline has many habitats including bays, estuaries, and salt marshes.

From north to south it has three distinct regions: the Grand Strand, Santee River Delta, and the Sea Islands. South Carolina is divided into five geographical regions running roughly parallel to the coastline called Physiographic Provinces – the Coastal Plain, Sandhills, Fall Line, Piedmont and Blue Ridge Mountains.Īlong the southern coast is the Coastal Plain that is divided into Outer and Inner Coastal Plains. They include intertidal flats and flooded salt marshes with plants like saltmeadow cordgrass, black needlerush, and smooth cordgrass. Estuarine wetlands are saltwater or brackish wetlands. Riverine wetlands are limited to shallow freshwater river and stream channels or, in the case of deep rivers, to shallow areas near the bank. Lacustrine wetlands are the shallows of permanently flooded lakes, reservoirs and intermittent lakes. Palustrine wetlands include wet pine flatwoods, pocosins, Carolina bays, beaver ponds, bottom-land hardwood forests, swamps, and tidal-freshwater marshes.

They have three kinds of freshwater wetlands - palustrine, lacustrine, and riverine.

Most (90%) of South Carolina’s wetlands are freshwater wetlands. Of that forest, more than half (54%) are hardwood trees. This is 68% of the state’s total land area. South Carolina has more than 13-million acres of forestland.

Armadillo south carolina