Data Management Plan

Main Hawaiian Islands (MHI): Hawaiian monk seal critical habitat in the terrestrial environments of Kauai, Lehua, Oahu, Maui Nui (including Kahoolawe, Lanai, Maui, Molokai), and Hawaii extends from the water's edge (mean lower low water line) inland 5 meters (in length) past the shoreline. The shoreline is described by the upper reaches of the wash of the waves, other than storm or seismic waves, at high tide during the season in which the highest wash of the waves occurs, usually evidenced by the edge of vegetation growth or the upper limit of debris.Areas ineligible for designation as critical habitat and areas that were excluded from critical habitat were clipped out of this dataset. The final rule (August 21, 2015 80 FR 50926) describes ineligible and excluded areas. Critical habitat does not include the following particular areas where they overlap with the locations described above: all cliffs and manmade structures, such as docks, seawalls, piers, fishponds, roads, pipelines, boat ramps, platforms, buildings, ramparts and pilings existing within the legal boundaries on September 21, 2015.

Process Steps:

• 2015-08-21 00:00:00 - Coastline locations designated as Hawaiian monk seal critical habitat (in addition to marine areas) were determined via a multi-step process. First, location data records from the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center were plotted as points. These data include sighting locations from 2007 - 2011, cell phone tag data, and aerial survey data from a survey completed in 2008. Five kilometer grid cell fishnets were created and placed over each island to create a standardized grid and a spatial join combined the location data with the grid cells. The attribute "Join Count" in that new grid file indicates how many location data points are within each grid cell. Based on expert opinion of the monk seal critical habitat team, it was determined that sites within any grid cell with a join count equalling 10% or more of the highest individual join count value for each island respectively would be considered to contain high use areas for inclusion in critical habitat. After isolating those grid cells, we used Google Earth imaging to refine the coastline areas within the grid cells to be included in critical habitat based on landscape features (i.e hardened shorelines or cliff faces were eliminated, continuous stretches of beach that were part inside and part outside of a grid cell were either included fully or eliminated, etc.). This was done with the help of an expert from the monk seal research program most famliar with the habitat use of seals at different locations around the MHI. The marine component and other portion of the terrestrial component of Hawaiian monk seal critical habitat is depcited in a seaprate polygon dataset.
• 2020-04-16 00:00:00 - Lines were copied from Final_HMSCH_Terr_MHI_2015.shp into this feature class during the NMFS 2020 national critical habitat standardization project. The data were processed to represent the final rule accurately. Minor edits (e.g., line removed around Kaula Island and lines removed around Niihau because they were deemed ineligible for designation in the final rule) were made to geometry in cases where the shapefile data did not represent the final CH designation. To support map service queries from this dataset, some line segments were dissolved to consolidate attributes. Note: there are inconsistencies in the final rule for Oahu between the line labels in the table (pg 50974) and the line labels on the map (pg 50984). The values for the Unit field in this feautre class were taken from the table (not the map).