Benchmarks serve as a critical component of vertical control in project and surveys areas. This layer consists of benchmarks that have been published on the National Geodetic Survey's website for the purpose of showing potential vertical control elements in the Mid-Atlantic. The benchmarks have been filtered to only show marks that have a Stability rating of A or B and elevation order of 1 or 2. There may be additional, useful marks available near a project site and can be found on the NGS Data Explorer.

These data provide available contemporary high-resolution national shoreline. The Continually Updated Shoreline Product is provided via the National Shoreline Data Explorer application.

These data are a collection of regional GIS (Arcview shapefiles and associated Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) metadata) benthic habitat files from studies conducted in specific locations within Florida. Data were collected in partnership with the NOAA Office for Coastal Management (formerly the Coastal Services Center) following the guidelines detailed by the NOAA Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP). Each regions's data is held in a separate subdirectory within this dataset.

These GIS benthic data vary in type and attributes depending on the purpose of the study for each region as follows - Apalachicola Bay, sediment profiling data and benthic community information gathered from grab sampling, Dry Tortugas, RoxAnn single-beam acoustic surveys which were part of a larger biogeographic characterization effort intended to characterize benthic habitats and ocean circulation patterns in the newly established Tortugas Ecological Reserve, Florida Bay, habitat polygons developed from National Geodetic Survey aerial photography according to NOAA Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) protocol, and Indian River Lagoon, mapping SAV beds and benthic habitat according to C-CAP protocol.

Each set of benthic data was developed according to protocols described in the associated FGDC metadata for each regional study. A generalized browse graphic was generated at the NODC for each region and included with these data.

Aerial photographs taken by NOAA's National Geodetic Survey during 1992 were mosaicked and orthorectified by the Biogeography Branch. The resulting image was used to digitize benthic, land cover and mangrove habitat maps of the Salt River Bay National Historic Park and Ecological Preserve (National Park Service), on St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.The mosaic is centered on the National Park Service Site, located on the north central coast of St. Croix, and in some areas extends beyond the park boundaries up to 2 km.

Input Data

NOAA Continuously Updated Shoreline Product (CUSP), accessed 1-11-2023; read a 1-page factsheet about CUSP; view and download CUSP data in the NOAA Shoreline Data Explorer (to download, select “Download CUSP by Region” and select Southeast Caribbean)
Southeast Blueprint 2023 subregions: Caribbean

Mapping Steps

Make a copy of the Southeast Caribbean CUSP feature line dataset and reproject it to ESPG 5070.
For the big island of Puerto Rico, special steps were required to deal with CUSP shorelines that did not connect across large rivers.
  Add and calculate a field to use to dissolve the lines.
    Dissolve the lines using the dissolve function, which reveals where there are gaps in the shoreline.
    Use the integrate tool to snap together nearby nodes, using a tolerance of 8 m. This connects the disconnected lines on the big island of Puerto Rico.
    Convert these modified shorelines to a polygon.
    Add and calculate a dissolve field, then dissolve using the dissolve tool. This is necessary because interior waterbodies on the big island of Puerto Rico also have shorelines in the CUSP data. This step produces a layer where inland waterbodies are included as a part of the island where they occur.
    From the resulting layer, select the big island of Puerto Rico and create a separate polygon feature layer from it. This extracts a modified shoreline boundary for the big island of Puerto Rico only. We don’t want to use the modified shorelines created above for other islands that didn’t have an issue of disconnected shoreline segments near large rivers.

Go back to the original Caribbean CUSP lines and convert them to polygons.
Add a dissolve field and dissolve using the dissolve tool. This produces a layer where all inland waterbodies are included as a part of the island where they occur.
From the island boundaries derived from the original CUSP data, remove the polygons that overlap with the big island of Puerto Rico derived from the modified CUSP data. This produces a layer representing all U.S. Caribbean islands except the big island of Puerto Rico.
Merge the modified big island of Puerto Rico layer with the layer for all other islands.
Create and populate a field that has unique IDs for all islands.
Convert the island polygon to a raster using the ArcPy Feature to Raster function. This makes a raster that correctly represents the interior of the islands. However, because the Feature to Raster function for polygons works differently than the Line to Raster function, the shoreline doesn’t perfectly match the result we get when we convert the CUSP lines to a raster. 
Because the Caribbean coastal shoreline condition indicator is created from the CUSP lines, we need the shorelines to match exactly. To reconcile this, go back to the original Caribbean CUSP line data and use the Feature to Raster function again, this time converting the lines to a raster. 
Use the ArcPy Cell Statistics “MAXIMUM” function to combine the two rasters above (one created from the CUSP lines and one created from the CUSP-derived polygons).
Export the raster that represents the extent of Caribbean islands.
Use the Region Group function to give unique values to each island.
Reclassify to make 3 island size classes. The big island of Puerto Rico is the only island in the highest class. The medium island class contains the following islands: Isla Mona, Isla de Vieques, Isla de Culebra, St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix. All other islands were put in the smaller class. All other non-island pixels in the Caribbean were given a value of marine.

Note: For more details on the mapping steps, code used to create this layer is available in the Southeast Blueprint 2023 Data Download or Caribbean-only Southeast Blueprint 2023 Data Download under > 6_Code. Literature Cited 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].

Habitat maps were created as part of a larger ecological assessment conducted by NOAA's National Ocean Service (NOS), Biogeography Branch, for Salt River Bay National Historic Park and Ecological Preserve (National Park Service).Aerial photographs were obtained for 1992 from the National Geodetic Survey, and were orthorectified by the Biogeography Branch. A classification scheme was set up with 20 benthic habitat types, 19 land cover types, and 13 mangrove habitat types. For this map of seagrass and mangrove habitats during 1992 only the 3 seagrass, and 14 mangrove classification categories were used. These were mapped directly into a GIS system through visual interpretation of orthorectified aerial photographs.