Seagrass maps
Toward a potential story map about seagrasses of the world
Hi Shane,
It was great to meet you at WildSpeak West.
Upon my return to the office I looked on our cloud resource, ArcGIS Online, for seagrass maps. Here's what I found.
There's excellent data for seagrasses of the United States. Not surprisingly, the map doesn't look like much at small scales...
...but if you zoom in on areas like the Florida Keys...
...or Chesapeake Bay, you'll see lots of detail.
The news isn't quite as good internationally. There are two maps, from The Nature Conservancy, that show sea grass by ecoregion. This one shows seagrass abundance...
...and this one shows number of seagrass species by ecoregion.
However, the World Conservation Monitoring Center (part of the UN Environment Program) has world seagrass data. It's much less detailed than the U.S. dataset, but it's pretty good. Detail of the Bahamas below.
The WCMC seagrass data is on ArcGIS Online, but requires some technical work, and perhaps permission, to optimize. That's why the last maps above aren't interactive--they're just screen grabs.
At any rate, I think this is more than worthy as a topic for a story map, and we'd be glad to assist you in creating one if you're so inclined. Thanks, Shane!
Here's the web map with the U.S. and Nature Conservancy data: https://story.maps.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=6275ecc9d00f4e2984bac338998c317e
Here's a metadata page; you can access source info for the layers from it: https://story.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=6275ecc9d00f4e2984bac338998c317e
And here's the WCMC page about their seagrass data: https://data.unep-wcmc.org/datasets/7
