Modeled Eelgrass Extent, British Columbia, Canada

10.21966/1ty5-e654

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.

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Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
Limitations: The modeling outputs of this work were dependent on (1) the resolution and accuracy of bathymetric data (which was not available for all parts of the BC coast) and (2) ShoreZone coverage (not all parts of the BC coast were surveyed using ShoreZone methods at the time of the analysis). ShoreZone data has been shown to underestimate the presence of eelgrass and the ability of ShoreZone to map the presence of eelgrass depends on eelgrass being visible in the intertidal and shallow subtidal region during the low tide imagery acquisition, therefore deeper subtidal beds are missed. ShoreZone data, and therefore these modeled outputs, represents a snapshot in time. Given known long-term dynamics of eelgrass meadows, these data do not indicate areas that have undergone losses or gains in eelgrass extent. Please refer to the report summary which contains a map that shows regions where eelgrass extent was not modeled due to the lack of available bathymetry and/or ShoreZone data. Appropriate credit must be given to Hakai Institute and the authors of the dataset.

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Metadata Reference Date(s)	August 19, 2026 (Publication) August 19, 2026 (Revision)
Data Reference Date(s)	September 02, 2016 (Publication)
Frequency of Update	As Needed

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Source last modified August 19, 2026 at 22:22

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