West Coast USA Nearshore CMECS Substrate Habitat

These data represent the Substrate Component (SC) of the Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS) out to the deepest edge of available data along the West Coast of the contiguous United States. The SC is organized into a branched hierarchy of five nested levels: substrate origin, substrate class, substrate subclass, substrate group, and substrate subgroup. Groups and subgroups of the SC are determined by the dominant substrate (defined as the most abundant in terms of percent cover). This is a data compilation; we cross-walked attributes from 71 datasets into CMECS SC ecological units.. These classifications were applied to Nearshore Zones currently part of the Pacific Marine and Estuarine Fish Habitat Partnership’s (PMEP) spatial data system, within the “West Coast USA Nearshore Zones” (PMEP) layer.

The West Coast Nearshore CMECS Substrate Data Quality layer represent data quality scores for West Coast USA CMECS Substrate Data. The Substrate dataset is a data compilation; source data are from a variety of sources, collected using multiple methods and across different scales. These data quality scores are intended to provide more information about the quality of source data inputs to the substrate dataset for data users.

For full documentation of CMECS, see https://coast.noaa.gov/data/digitalcoast/pdf/cmecs.pdf.