U.S. National Estuarine Research Reserves

This dataset represents the National Estuarine Research Reserves in the United States, created by compiling many reserve-level datasets obtained by the Conservation Biology Institute from the National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS). Units in the NERRS are used to "identify and track short-term variability and long-term changes in the integrity and biodiversity of representative estuarine ecosystems and coastal watersheds for the purpose of contributing to effective national, regional and site specific coastal zone management." (http://cdmo.baruch.sc.edu/overview.html) The reserve boundaries were generally mapped independently by each reserve in the system, and thus are not necessarily comparable in terms of spatial accuracy. The spatial scale of the reserve boundaries is generally 1:24,000 or larger.