DEPRECATED - Southeast Blueprint Subregions [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] {2023}
Department of the Interior · 2023 Full Details
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- Title
- DEPRECATED - Southeast Blueprint Subregions [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] {2023}
- Description
- INLAND CONTINENTAL SUBREGIONSThe continental portion of the Southeast Blueprint is composed of 15 Southeast states and the surrounding marine environment to the end of U.S. waters in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. We further subdivide the continental area into inland and marine subregions as described below.Input DataU.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)Level IV Ecoregions shapefile with state boundaries(EPA L4), accessed 12-8-2021U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)Watershed Boundary Dataset(WBD), accessed 12-8-2021: HUC4s;download the dataMarine Ecoregions Level IIIfrom the Commission for Environmental Cooperation North American Environmental Atlas, accessed 12-8-20212021 Census TIGER/Lines State boundary, accessed 12-8-2021Mapping StepsFor more details on the mapping steps, code used to create this layer is availablein the Southeast Blueprint 2023 Data Downloadunder > 6_Code. Generally, we used the following mapping steps:Identify the non-coastal state boundaries of subregions using the state boundaries from the EPA Level IV ecoregions.Define the coastal edges of the subregions using the coastal extent of the HUC4 watersheds.Do some initial grouping of the EPA ecoregions to make larger ecoregions. Usually, we grouped by Level III ecoregions; sometimes we went down to the Level IV ecoregions to make smoother, larger ecoregions.The EPA ecoregions include some "islands" where part of an ecoregion is not contiguous with the rest. Because we need contiguous subregions to use in running Zonation, identify those "islands" and assign them to the contiguous ecoregion that surrounds them. In addition, some ecoregions have long, finger-like, "peninsulas" that protrude from the ecoregion. Sometimes we assigned these to the surrounding ecoregion to make smoother edges.Union together the modified EPA ecoregions and HUC4 watershed layers and reclassify to assign subregions to unique combinations of EPA ecoregions and HUC4 watersheds.For the "islands" and "peninsulas" mentioned above, we made exceptions to the above rules and assigned those polygons to the subregion that surrounds them.Use the Census TIGER/Lines state boundaries to remove HUC4 areas that extend beyond the Southeast Blueprint extent. This removes some coastal water areas in the Northeast United States that were outside the Southeast Blueprint area.Detailed descriptions of how each subregion is defined are available in the Defining Subregions section of theSoutheast Blueprint 2023 Development Process.Literature CitedCommission for Environmental Cooperation. 2009. Marine Ecoregions of North America, 2008.Vector digital data.Montréal, Québec, Canada. [http://www.cec.org/north-american-environmental-atlas/marine-ecoregions-level-iii/].Moilanen, A., L.Meller, J.Leppänen, F.M.Pouzols, H.Kujala, A.Arponen. 2014. Zonation Spatial Conservation Planning Framework and Software V4.0, User Manual. [https://github.com/cbig/zonation-core/releases/download/4.0.0/zonation_manual_v4_0.pdf].U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau, Geography Division, Spatial Data Collection and Products Branch. TIGER/Line Shapefile, 2021, U.S. Current State and Equivalent National. 2021. [https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/tiger-line-file.html].U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Level IV Ecoregions of the Conterminous United States. U.S. EPA Office of Research & Development (ORD) - National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL). Corvallis, OR. Published April 16, 2013. [https://www.epa.gov/eco-research/level-iii-and-iv-ecoregions-continental-united-states].U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). National Watershed Boundary Dataset in FileGDB 10.1 format. Published July 28, 2020. [https://www.usgs.gov/national-hydrography/watershed-boundary-dataset].MARINE CONTINENTAL SUBREGIONSFor the purposes of Zonation, we do not further subdivide the marine subregion, although the steps below do create finer Atlantic and Gulf marine layers that are used in the development of several continental marine indicators.Input DataNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)U.S. Maritime Limits and Boundaries,accessed 11-22-2022Base Blueprint 2022 extentMapping StepsFor both the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, define the inshore extent by the Base Blueprint 2022 extent.Hand-digitize the offshore extent using the "trace" editing feature and the offshore Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) boundary from the U.S. Maritime Limits and Boundaries layer.Extend the northernmost extent of the offshore Atlantic marine boundary by-hand editing following the Base Blueprint 2022 extent and a SW to NE extension guided by the EEZ boundaries.In the absence of any other supporting justification, impose an artificial break to split the Gulf and the Atlantic marine zones near Key Largo, FL. This separation is an approximate extension of US Hwy 1.Convert the final vector dataset to raster using the GDAL Vector to Raster utility in QGIS and snap to the extent and cell size of the 2022 Base Blueprint.Literature CitedFlanders Marine Institute (2019). Maritime Boundaries Geodatabase: Maritime Boundaries and Exclusive Economic Zones (200NM), version 11. Available online at [https://www.marineregions.org/. [https://doi.org/10.14284/386].CARIBBEAN SUBREGIONSThe Caribbean portion of the Southeast Blueprint is composed of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and a subset of the surrounding marine environment.It was intended to cover as broad a swath as possible of the terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands given the data available.We did not further subdivide the Caribbean subregion because the area is small enough that it is computationally feasible to run the analysis across the entire area.Input DataThe Nature Conservancy's (TNC)Caribbean benthic habitat maps, accessed 12-21-2022:read a press release about the data;read a scientific journal article about the data;request to download the dataNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)Coastal Relief Model(Vol.9 - Puerto Rico), accessed 11-22-2022NOAAU.S. Maritime Limits and Boundaries,accessed 11-22-2022NOAA Continuously Updated Shoreline Product(CUSP), accessed 1-18-2023;read a 1-page factsheet about CUSP; view and download CUSP data in theNOAA Shoreline Data Explorer(to download, select "Download CUSP by Region" and select Southeast Caribbean)LANDFIRE 2020 (version 2.2.0) Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands: Existing Vegetation Type (EVT)Mapping StepsProcessing steps were performed in the QGIS v3.22 graphical modeler.Prepare the TNC benthic data by merging together the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico layers into one dataset using the DGDAL Merge utility. Using the Reclassify utility, reclassify the TNC benthic classes into a single class representing the extent of the TNC benthic analysis.Prepare the coastal relief data by importing the netCDF file using the Import NetCDF function. Reclassify the coastal relief data to assign a value of 0 to elevations ranging from -10,000-0 and a value of 1 to elevations ranging from 0.0001 to 1,500. This separates out all land areas, which have an elevation >0.Prepare the U.S. maritime limits and boundaries data by selecting the marine boundaries for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Select all lines with a REGION field value of "Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands". Hand-edit the marine boundary lines to create marine boundary polygons.Fill in the holes in the marine boundary polygons, which represent land areas, using the Delete Holes utility. This creates a layer representing the combined land and sea jurisdiction of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.Clip the processed coastal relief data to the Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands land and sea jurisdiction layer using the GDAL Clip utility. This step removes data in the British Virgin Islands, creating an elevation layer that distinguishes land and sea areas within Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.Combine the U.S. Caribbean elevation layer with the TNC benthic data to create a preliminary extent using the Raster Boolean OR utility. The resulting layer includes all land pixels with an elevation >0 in NOAA's coastal relief model and all sea pixels assessed in TNC's benthic habitat layer.Convert that layer to vector using the GRASS Raster to Vector utility and extract the desired TNC benthic and land areas from the background values using Select by Attribute.The resulting layer has gaps in coverage between the land and TNC benthic ocean values. Remove holes <1,000,000 sq m (247 acres) using the Delete Holes utility.Use hand-digitizing to further modify the extent to include areas captured in the CUSP shoreline dataset. Use the CUSP line data to create a polygon covering Isla Desecheo, which was not included in the coastal relief model.Cricket Rock, Dutchcap Key, Cockroach Island, Mona Island and Isla Monita were all excluded from the coastal relief model but did have a marine extent included in the benthic habitat data. Guided by the CUSP shoreline data, hand-edit each of the polygons for these small islands to fill in the land areas.Convert the final vector dataset to raster using the GDAL Vector to Raster utility in QGIS and snap to the extent and cell size of the LANDFIRE 2020 EVT raster.Literature CitedFlanders Marine Institute (2019). Maritime Boundaries Geodatabase: Maritime Boundaries and Exclusive Economic Zones (200NM), version 11. Available online athttps://www.marineregions.org/. [https://doi.org/10.14284/386].LANDFIRE, Earth Resources Observation and Science Center (EROS), U.S. Geological Survey. Published August 1, 2022. LANDFIRE 2020 Existing Vegetation Type (EVT) Puerto Rico US Virgin Islands. LF 2020, raster digital data. Sioux Falls, SD. [https://www.landfire.gov].National Geophysical Data Center, 2005. U.S. Coastal Relief Model - Puerto Rico. National Geophysical Data Center, NOAA. Accessed November 22, 2022. [https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/coastal-relief-model].National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Ocean Service, National Geodetic Survey. NOAA Continually Updated Shoreline Product (CUSP): Southeast Caribbean. [https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/data/cusp.html].Schill SR, McNulty VP, Pollock FJ, Lüthje F, Li J, Knapp DE, Kington JD, McDonald T, Raber GT, Escovar-Fadul X, Asner GP. Regional High-Resolution Benthic Habitat Data from Planet Dove Imagery for Conservation Decision-Making and Marine Planning. Remote Sensing. 2021; 13(21):4215. [https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13214215].
- Creator
- Department of the Interior
- Temporal Coverage
- 2023
- Date Issued
- 2023-09-05
- Access Rights
- Public
- Format
- File
- Language
- English
- Date Added
- August 28, 2025
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Cite and Reference
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Citation
Department of the Interior (2023). DEPRECATED - Southeast Blueprint Subregions [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] {2023}. . https://gis-fws.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/fws::deprecated-southeast-blueprint-2023-subregions (web service) -
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