Description: The Pacific Marine and Estuarine Fish Habitat Partnership(PMEP), is a nationally recognized partnership that seeks to advance regional and national goals relating to fish habitat. PMEP is a consortium of organizations focused on West Coast fish habitat in the region's estuaries and nearshore marine waters.These data represent the Biotic Component (BC) of the Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS) out to -200 m or state waters (PMEP's boundary) of the West Coast of the contiguous United States. The BC is organized into a branched hierarchy of five nested levels: setting, class, subclass, group, and community. Classes and subclasses of the BC are determined by the dominant biota (defined as the most abundant in terms of percent cover) of the substrate. This is a data compilation; we cross-walked attributes from 20 datasets into CMECS BC 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. For full documentation of CMECS, see https://coast.noaa.gov/data/digitalcoast/pdf/cmecs.pdf.Vers. 1.0, Last Updated August 22, 2022
Service Item Id: feb488f8c018414aa11a33c837cc0c5f
Copyright Text: Pacific Marine and Estuarine Fish Habitat Partnership, Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission GIS