D.A. Reusser | Search USGS

USGS2013

User's guide and metadata for WestuRe: U.S. Pacific Coast estuary/watershed data and R tools

Overview There are about 350 estuaries along the U.S. Pacific Coast (U.S. Fish andWildlife 2011). Basic descriptive data for these estuaries, such as their size and watershed area, are important for coastal-scale research and conservation planning. However, this information is spread among many sources, making it difficult to find and standardize. The goal of the WestuRe Project is to provide a framework to: (1) make general descriptive data for estuaries and their watersheds more accessible, and (2) provide tools to make analyzing and visualizing these data easier. The WestuRe download includes data describing U.S. Pacific Coast estuaries and their corresponding watersheds from northern Washington (including the region located along the Strait of Juan de Fuca that goes from Port Townsend to Cape Flattery, 48.383°N) to southern California (Tijuana Estuary, 32.557°N), excluding Puget Sound proper and coastal islands (Fig. 1). The WestuRe data currently include shapefiles of estuary and watershed polygons as well as CSV files summarizing geomorphological and climate data (Fig. 2, Section 2). The WestuRe tools help users extract and view relevant data using the statistical program R and Google Earth (Fig. 3, Section 3). Potential applications of the data include: Describing and comparing estuaries and watersheds at the landscape scale Identifying relationships between estuary/watershed variables Incorporating estuary/watershed attributes in models to predict species and habitat distributions Classifying estuaries according to morphology, climate, and habitat (Lee and Brown 2009)

California, Oregon, Washington↗

USGS2008

Predictions for an invaded world: A strategy to predict the distribution of native and non-indigenous species at multiple scales

Habitat models can be used to predict the distributions of marine and estuarine non-indigenous species (NIS) over several spatial scales. At an estuary scale, our goal is to predict the estuaries most likely to be invaded, but at a habitat scale, the goal is to predict the specific locations within an estuary that are most vulnerable to invasion. As an initial step in evaluating several habitat models, model performance for a suite of benthic species with reasonably well-known distributions on the Pacific coast of the US needs to be compared. We discuss the utility of non-parametric multiplicative regression (NPMR) for predicting habitat- and estuary-scale distributions of native and NIS. NPMR incorporates interactions among variables, allows qualitative and categorical variables, and utilizes data on absence as well as presence. Preliminary results indicate that NPMR generally performs well at both spatial scales and that distributions of NIS are predicted as well as those of native species. For most species, latitude was the single best predictor, although similar model performance could be obtained at both spatial scales with combinations of other habitat variables. Errors of commission were more frequent at a habitat scale, with omission and commission errors approximately equal at an estuary scale. ?? 2008 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Published by Oxford Journals. All rights reserved.

Conference Paper↗