Shallow-Water Benthic Habitats of St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands

摘要

This report describes the creation and assessment of benthic habitat maps for the nearshore waters of St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands. The objective of this effort, conducted by NOAA's Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment - Biogeography Branch in partnership with the U.S. National Park Service (NPS), was to provide spatially-explicit information on the habitat types, biological cover and live coral cover of St. John's coral reef ecosystem. These fine-scale habitat maps, generated by visual interpretion of satellite and airborne imagery, represent a significant improvement from NOAA's 2001 digital maps (Kendall et al.) of the U.S. Caribbean due to an expanded habitat classification scheme, smaller minimum mapping unit, and more recent imagery.