Percent of Coast Densely Populated by Marine Ecoregion

Percent of coastline densely populated, by marine ecoregion.

The map shows the proportion of coastline (from the shore to within five kilometers of the coast) in each ecoregion where there are more than five hundred persons per square kilometer. By focusing attention on a narrow coastal strip, we believe that we are capturing areas with the highest likelihood of significant losses of intertidal and adjacent habitats as a result of building, dredging, land reclamation, and other forms of coastal engineering. It does not, of course, measure areas of coastal development per se and does not capture areas where aquaculture, agriculture, or low-density tourism have impacts.

These data were derived by The Nature Conservancy, and were displayed in a map published in The Atlas of Global Conservation (Hoekstra et al., University of California Press, 2010). More information at http://nature.org/atlas.

Data derived from:
Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Columbia University; and Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT). 2005. Gridded Population of the World Version 3 (GPWv3), Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), Columbia University Palisades, New York. Available at http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/gpw. Digital media.