Submerged Aquatic Vegetation of Bogue Sound, North Carolina 1992 Geoform

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Sample of benthic cover data

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The DTED was used as the horizontal control during the orthorectification. | Source Geospatial Form: map | Type of Source Media: CD-ROM

The 1992 imagery for Bogue Sound, NC was acquired from the NOS MapFinder Web site (http://mapfinder.nos.noaa.gov/). Signature development took place during the summer of 2001. Field observations were used to help the interpreter recognize and identify the benthic signatures and develop the classification scheme. The images were scanned using a photogrammetric quality scanner (AGFA Horizon Plus) at a resolution of 600 dots per inch (dpi) resulting in a pixel resolution of 0.85 meters. The digital images were orthorectified using ERDAS Imagine 8.5 Orthobase. No camera report was available for the 1992 imagery, so the default RC-20 Wild camera settings were used. Ground control points were selected from similar features on the 1999 North Carolina USGS standard digital orthophoto quadrangles (DOQ). The DOQs are compressed JPEG files at a scale of 1:12,000 with 1-meter resolution. They were purchased from the state of North Carolina in 2002. NIMA Digital Terrain Elevation Data (DTED) level 1 coverage with a 77-meter resolution were used for the vertical data reference. The orthorectified images were interpreted and digitized on screen using ArcGIS 8.2. The benthic data is classified according to the System for Classification of Habitats in Estuarine and Marine Environments (SCHEME). This system is fully described in "Development of a System for Classification of Habitats in Estuarine and Marine Environments (SCHEME) for Florida, Report to U.S. EPA - Gulf of Mexico Program, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Florida Marine Research Institute. Review Draft 12/04/02." The data was labeled using ArcView 3.2 and the Benthic Habitat Digitizer extension (developed by the NOS Biogeography Program). The data have not been assessed for thematic accuracy due to the large disparity between dates of image acquisition in 1992 and interpretation in 2002. The data was assessed for spatial accuracy during the fall of 2002. Sources used in this processing step were the DTED, Aerial Photos, and DOQs.

The data were converted from a single ESRI polygon shapefile classified according to the System for Classifying Habitats in Estuarine and Marine Environments (SCHEME) to the Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS) 2012 format (which can be found at https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/cmecs-crosswalk) which produces separate geoform, geoform, and geoform feature layers from the original input benthic habitat dataset. This geoform feature layer contains CMECS geoform component attributes where an "Equal" or "Nearly Equal" SCHEME value was present in the original data. Polygons for which no geoform information was present have been removed. No other changes to the original polygon boundaries or any other alterations of the original SCHEME data were made during this process.