Carolina Environmental Diversity Explorations
Roan Mountain Highlands · By Dirk Frankenberg and Jennifer Godwin-Wyer
Grassy bald community
Figure 3. Another view of the grassy bald community. (Photograph by Dirk Frankenberg. More about the photograph)
Figure 3 shows another close-up view of the grassy bald community. The nearby Roan High Knob with its spruce/fir forest is in the background. Taken together, Figures 1–3 are designed to give you a sense of how the major plant communities of the Roan Highlands are distributed. The highest peaks are occupied either by spruce/fir forests or by grassy balds, and no one seems to know why one occurs in one place and the other in another. We do know that the present distribution of these communities has stayed pretty much the same since they we first visited by naturalists in the early nineteenth century.
