Data Management Plan

The Submerged Lands Act (43 U.S.C. Section 1301 et seq.) grants coastal states title to natural resources located within their coastal submerged lands and navigable waters out to three nautical miles from their coastlines (three marine leagues for Texas and Florida's Gulf of Mexico coastlines). The Submerged Lands Act defines "natural resources" to include oil, gas, and all other minerals, and fish, shrimp, oysters, clams, crabs, lobsters, sponges, kelp, and other marine animal and plant life," yet expressly excludes "water power, or the use of water for the production of power" 43 U.S.C. Section 1301(e). The term "coast line" is "the line of ordinary low water along that portion of the coast which is in direct contact with the open sea and the line marking the seaward limit of inland waters" (43 U.S.C. Section 1301(c)). Some boundary delineations are approximated, including areas in Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington State. The official delineation of the Submerged Lands Act in these locations has not yet been established by BOEM. Please reference BOEM's official Submerged Lands Act Boundary in these locations to determine where this boundary is approximated and where it is official.

Source: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title43/pdf/USCODE-2011-title43-chap29.pdf

Date enacted: May 22, 1953

Codification: 43 U.S.C. Sec. 1301 et seq.

Authority: agencies of several U.S. coastal states

Process Steps:

• 2016-01-01 00:00:00 - 1. Acquired national shoreline/s from authoritative sources (NOAA, BOEM, and NGA) to use as the inland extent of the Submerged Lands Act (SLA) boundary. 2. Acquired international borders (Canada and Mexico) from authoritative sources (OCS and USGS, respectively). 3. Acquired the seaward Submerged Lands Act line work from BOEM (Lower 48 and Alaska only). Acquired NOAA 3nm line work from OCS (via email) for Hawaii and those areas of Alaska that do not have a BOEM-defined SLA boundary. (NOTE: some western Hawaiian islands have a 3nm line based on reefs, rather than the source shoreline (via NGA) extents.) The Exclusive Economic Zone (derived from the Energy Policy Act boundary) was used in places like Maine, Texas, and Washington state, where unclosed polylines in the BOEM SLA occurred over open water. 4. Created a national polygon shoreline, using the various shoreline sources and international borders. This was used as the landward extent of the SLA boundary. (NOTE: in northeast Alaska, the BOEM shoreline and OCS international boundary did not intersect. Used the NGA shoreline to close the small gap between these two sources.) 5. The seaward extent of the SLA boundary was generated in various ways, depending on the region and the respective data available. The methods are detailed as follows: 6. For the Lower 48, manually combined the BOEM SLA boundary, the OCS US/Canada boundary, and the USGS US/Mexico boundary. The Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA) boundary was used where the BOEM SLA boundary was discontinuous (Florida) or did not connect with other boundaries (Washington State). 7. For Alaska, manually combined the BOEM SLA boundary and the OCS 3nm line. Where different component boundaries (polylines) did not meet/coincide, a line was drawn between the two at a perpendicular angle, based on the bearing of the line segment formed by the last two vertices of the "more official" boundary. For example, this was done in Alaska where the BOEM SLA and OCS 3nm lines did not line up. In such a case, the connecting line(s) was derived by adding a line perpendicular from the final line segment of the BOEM SLA boundary, per location. 8. For Hawaii, the respective features within the OCS 3nm boundary were extracted, as no published SLA boundary previously existed. 9. Combined all seaward extents of the varying regions into one national feature class. 10. Combined the seaward and landward (i.e. shoreline) segment boundaries into one feature class, then converted to a polygon. Before converting to a polygon, had to address 13 topology errors within the BOEM SLA data, where very small gaps within the polyline existed. (Five errors were in Alaska and eight were in the Gulf of Mexico.) These gaps were closed by creating a straight line between the two end nodes. 11. Generated a Great Lakes polygon, using the NOAA medium resolution shoreline and the US/Canada international boundary. 12. Visually inspected boundary extents to make sure they were coincident to respective data source boundaries. 13. Added fields and populated according to data dictionary. 2022-10-25 14. Executed REPAIR GEOMETRY function to remove non simple features and duplicate vertex features. 15. Executed the INTERSECT function with a one degree reference grid. 16. Adjusted the field sizes to better reflect the actual size of each field