British Columbia Estuary Threats Assessment

This dataset was developed as part of the research for a Royal Roads University master's thesis entitled "Assessing the impact of human activities on British Columbia’s estuaries". The work was also published through PLOS One (Robb, 2014). The estuary polygons were created by the Pacific Estuary Conservation Program (PECP). Please see Ryder et al., 2007 for more information on their creation. This dataset includes a subset of the PECP estuary dataset because only those estuary polygons that could be linked to to a unique watershed were considered in the analysis. The attributes for each estuary polygon show the spatial coverage of different human activities within the bounds of the estuary and its upstream watershed. The areas represented by the human activities includes their potential zone of impact and therefore extend beyond their direct spatial footprint. The attribute table lists the spatial coverage of each activity within the bounds of the estuary, as well as the percentage of the estuary/watershed system that is covered by the activity. For point features, the density of points within the estuary/watershed are used. Further attributes describe the coverage of conservation designations within the estuary/watershed system. Finally, the 'cluster' variable assigns each estuaries to a cluster group with similar distribution and magnitude of zoned threats, as described in Robb, 2014.