Modeled Eelgrass Extent, British Columbia, Canada

This dataset represents modeled areal extent of eelgrass meadows (Zostera marina) in coastal British Columbia, Canada. This dataset was generated between 2016 and 2017 as part of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation efforts to estimate blue carbon storage in eelgrass meadows across the Pacific Northwest. To model the areal spatial extent of British Columbia a novel tool was created for use in ArcGIS. This tool required 2 inputs: (1) the coastline data from Shorezone (ie. vector line features with attributes on the presence or absence of eelgrass along a linear extent of coastline) and (2) bathymetry data. Briefly, each line segment of coast in ShoreZone was converted to points along its vertices and points were used to generate Thiessen polygons. Thiessen polygons were clipped to a selected bathymetric contour (5 m or 3 m) based on the results of regional bathymetry analysis. The modeled outputs were compared to available mapping data from the British Columbia Marine Conservation Analysis Atlas to assess model accuracy.

Please refer to the report summary for the details on methods and caveats.