Southeast Blueprint 2025 Subregions

CONTINENTAL SUBREGIONS The continental portion of the Southeast Blueprint is composed of 15 Southeast states and the surrounding marine environment to the end of U.S. waters in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of America. We further subdivide the continental area into subregions as described below. Input Data * U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) [Level IV Ecoregions shapefile with state boundaries] (EPA L4), accessed 12-8-2021 * U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) [Watershed Boundary Dataset] (WBD), accessed 12-8-2021: HUC4s; [download the data] * [2021 Census TIGER/Line State boundary], accessed 12-8-2021 * National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) [U.S. Maritime Limits and Boundaries,] accessed 9-20-2023 * [Marine Ecoregions Level III] from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation North American Environmental Atlas, accessed 12-8-2021 * [Southeast Blueprint extent] * [Southeast Blueprint 2023 subregions] Mapping Steps Note: For more details on the mapping steps, code used to create this layer is available [in the Southeast Blueprint 2025 Data Download] under > 6_Code. Generally, we used the following mapping steps. Inland Continental * Do some initial grouping of the EPA ecoregions to make larger ecoregions. Usually, we grouped by Level III ecoregions; sometimes we went down to the Level IV ecoregions to make smoother, larger ecoregions. * The EPA ecoregions include some “islands” where part of an ecoregion is not contiguous with the rest. Because we need contiguous subregions to use in running Zonation, identify those “islands” and assign them to the contiguous ecoregion that surrounds them. In addition, some ecoregions have long, finger-like, “peninsulas” that protrude from the ecoregion. Sometimes we assigned these to the surrounding ecoregion to make smoother edges. * Union together the modified EPA ecoregions and HUC4 watershed layers and reclassify to assign subregions to unique combinations of EPA ecoregions and HUC4 watersheds. * For the “islands” and “peninsulas” mentioned above, we made exceptions to the above rules and assigned those polygons to the subregion that surrounds them. * Use the census TIGER/Line state boundaries to remove HUC4 areas that extend beyond the Southeast Blueprint extent (i.e., states not part of SECAS). This removes some coastal water areas in the Northeast United States that are outside the Southeast Blueprint area. Detailed descriptions of all inland and marine continental subregions are available in Table 8 in the Running Zonation chapter of the [Southeast Blueprint Development Process]. Marine Continental * From the NOAA maritime limits and boundaries layer, select the lines from the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) that define the outer limit of the U.S. offshore marine waters in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of America. * Intersect the EEZ lines with the inland continental subregions to create a large marine polygon bounded by the coastal edge of the inland subregion and the EEZ. In the vast majority of the coastline, the coastal boundaries of the inland subregions are defined by HUC4s. In a tiny area of south Texas, the coastal boundary is instead defined by EPA Level III Ecoregions, and minor hand-editing is required to make the EEZ intersect with the subregional boundary there. * From the marine ecoregions layer, pull out the South Florida/Bahamian Atlantic Level 1 marine ecoregion. * Use that selected South Florida ecoregion to split the bigger marine subregion created above into three distinct subregions: Gulf of America, Atlantic, and South Florida Marine. Detailed descriptions of all marine and inland continental subregions are available in Table 8 in the Running Zonation chapter of the [Southeast Blueprint Development Process]. Literature Cited Commission for Environmental Cooperation. 2009. Marine Ecoregions of North America, 2008. Vector digital data. Montréal, Québec, Canada. [[https://www.cec.org/north-american-environmental-atlas/marine-ecoregions-level-iii/]]. Flanders Marine Institute (2019). Maritime Boundaries Geodatabase: Maritime Boundaries and Exclusive Economic Zones (200NM), version 11. Available online at [[https://www.marineregions.org/]]. [[https://doi.org/10.14284/386]]. Moilanen, A., I. Kohonen, P. Lehtinen, I. Kivistö, J. Jalkanen, E. Virtanen, H. Kujala. March 2024. Zonation 5 v2.0 User Manual. [[https://github.com/zonationteam/Zonation5/releases/download/v2.0/manual_and_example_setups.zip]]. Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy (SECAS). 2021. South Atlantic Extent and Subregions 2021. [[https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/61002b01d34ef8d7055c7db2]]. U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau, Geography Division, Spatial Data Collection and Products Branch. TIGER/Line Shapefile, 2021, U.S. Current State and Equivalent National. 2021. [[https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/tiger-line-file.html]]. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Level IV Ecoregions of the Conterminous United States. U.S. EPA Office of Research & Development (ORD) - National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL). Corvallis, OR. Published April 16, 2013. [[https://www.epa.gov/eco-research/level-iii-and-iv-ecoregions-continental-united-states]]. U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). National Watershed Boundary Dataset in FileGDB 10.1 format. Published July 28, 2020. [[https://www.usgs.gov/national-hydrography/watershed-boundary-dataset]. CARIBBEAN SUBREGIONS The Caribbean portion of the Southeast Blueprint is composed of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and a subset of the surrounding marine environment. It was intended to cover as broad a swath as possible of the terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands given the data available. It is composed of two distinct subregions, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, each of which serves as its own Zonation zone. Input Data * The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) [Caribbean benthic habitat maps], accessed 12-21-2022: [read a press release about the data]; [read a scientific journal article about the data]; [request to download the data] * National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) [Coastal Relief Model] (Vol.9 - Puerto Rico), accessed 11-22-2022 * NOAA [U.S. Maritime Limits and Boundaries,] accessed 11-22-2022 * [NOAA Continuously Updated Shoreline Product] (CUSP), accessed 1-18-2023; [read a 1-page factsheet about CUSP]; view and download CUSP data in the [NOAA Shoreline Data Explorer](to download, select “Download CUSP by Region” and select Southeast Caribbean) * 2020 [LANDFIRE Existing Vegetation Type] (EVT) [LF 2.2.0] for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (U.S. Insular Areas); [access the data] Mapping Steps * Processing steps were performed in the QGIS v3.22 graphical modeler. * Prepare the TNC benthic data by merging together the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico layers into one dataset using the DGDAL Merge utility. Using the Reclassify utility, reclassify the TNC benthic classes into a single class representing the extent of the TNC benthic analysis. * Prepare the coastal relief data by importing the NetCDF file using the Import NetCDF function. Reclassify the coastal relief data to assign a value of 0 to elevations ranging from -10,000 to 0 and a value of 1 to elevations ranging from 0.0001 to 1,500. This separates out all land areas, which have an elevation >0. * Prepare the U.S. maritime limits and boundaries data by selecting the marine boundaries for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Select all lines with a REGION field value of “Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands”. Hand-edit the marine boundary lines to create marine boundary polygons. * Fill in the holes in the marine boundary polygons, which represent land areas, using the Delete Holes utility. This creates a layer representing the combined land and sea jurisdiction of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. * Clip the processed coastal relief data to the Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands land and sea jurisdiction layer using the GDAL Clip utility. This step removes data in the British Virgin Islands, creating an elevation layer that distinguishes land and sea areas within Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. * Combine the U.S. Caribbean elevation layer with the TNC benthic data to create a preliminary extent using the Raster Boolean OR utility. The resulting layer includes all land pixels with an elevation >0 in NOAA’s coastal relief model and all sea pixels in TNC’s benthic habitat layer. * Convert that layer to vector using the GRASS Raster to Vector utility and extract the desired TNC benthic and land areas from the background values using Select by Attribute. * The resulting layer has gaps in coverage between the land and TNC benthic ocean values. Remove holes <1,000,000 m² (247 acres) using the Delete Holes utility. * Hand-digitize to further modify the extent to include areas captured in the CUSP shoreline dataset. Use the CUSP line data to create a polygon covering Isla Desecheo, which was not included in the coastal relief model. * Cricket Rock, Dutchcap Key, Cockroach Island, Mona Island and Isla Monita were all excluded from the coastal relief model but did have a marine extent included in the benthic habitat data. Guided by the CUSP shoreline data, hand-edit each of the polygons for these small islands to fill in the land areas. * Convert the final vector dataset to raster using the GDAL Vector to Raster utility in QGIS and snap to the extent and cell size of the LANDFIRE 2020 EVT raster. * In 2025, we added several new Caribbean indicators that apply to only the U.S. Virgin Islands or to Puerto Rico, but not both. To make these work in Zonation without inadvertently penalizing the areas of the Caribbean not covered by these new indicators, we ran Zonation separately in Puerto Rico and USVI, instead of together in one Caribbean subregion. To facilitate this, we added an extra mapping step to create unique subregions for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. To do this, in ArcPro, bring in the 2023 raster extent created above and convert it to a polygon (these data use the spatial projection EPSG 5070). Then, for the Caribbean area, use the “x” coordinate of each polygon to assign it to either the U.S. Virgin Islands (x>3326000) or Puerto Rico (x>3000000). Note: For more details on the mapping steps, code used to create this layer is available [in the Southeast Blueprint 2025 Data Download] or [Caribbean-only Southeast Blueprint 2025 Data Download] under > 6_Code. Literature Cited Flanders Marine Institute (2019). Maritime Boundaries Geodatabase: Maritime Boundaries and Exclusive Economic Zones (200NM), version 11. Available online at [https://www.marineregions.org/]. [[https://doi.org/10.14284/386]]. LANDFIRE, Earth Resources Observation and Science Center (EROS), U.S. Geological Survey. Published August 1, 2022. LANDFIRE 2020 Existing Vegetation Type (EVT) Puerto Rico US Virgin Islands. LF 2020, raster digital data. Sioux Falls, SD. [[https://www.landfire.gov]]. National Geophysical Data Center, 2005. U.S. Coastal Relief Model - Puerto Rico. National Geophysical Data Center, NOAA. Accessed November 22, 2022. [[https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/coastal-relief-model]]. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Ocean Service, National Geodetic Survey. NOAA Continually Updated Shoreline Product (CUSP): Southeast Caribbean. [[https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/data/cusp.html]]. Schill SR, McNulty VP, Pollock FJ, Lüthje F, Li J, Knapp DE, Kington JD, McDonald T, Raber GT, Escovar-Fadul X, Asner GP. Regional High-Resolution Benthic Habitat Data from Planet Dove Imagery for Conservation Decision-Making and Marine Planning. Remote Sensing. 2021; 13(21):4215. [[https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13214215]]. COMBINING SUBREGIONS Input Data * Continental inland subregions (created above) * Continental marine subregions (created above) * Caribbean subregions (Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands, created above) Mapping Steps * Merge the continental inland, continental marine, and Caribbean subregions into one subregion file. * Note: In 2024 and 2025, we decided to use the same Blueprint extent as version 2023. This extent leaves out some estuarine areas in Virginia that are included in the TIGER/Lines state boundaries. In the future, we may want to extend the Blueprint to those areas, but in order to do that, we would first have to extend all our indicators to cover the new areas. Our approach to creating the 2025 subregions will allow us to do that in future iterations. However, to avoid confusion, for the Blueprint 2025 release, we are limiting the subregions back to the 2023 extent. Consequently, we do not include the larger subregion layer in the Blueprint 2025 download package, but rather save it in [a project archive] for future reference. * To limit the 2025 subregions back to the 2023 Blueprint extent, convert the 2023 Southeast Blueprint extent raster to a polygon and union it with the subregions made above. Calculate an attribute identifying which areas were in the 2023 Southeast Blueprint extent, and export that as the final 2025 subregions layer. * Add a new zone attribute and group the 2025 subregions into the zones that will be used in Zonation. The continental zone assignments are described in Table 8 above. The Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands subregions in the Caribbean each serve as their own zones. * Export the subregion vector file, the full Blueprint extent raster file (including the Caribbean), and the continental-only Blueprint raster extent files used in the 2025 Southeast Blueprint. For more details on the mapping steps, code used to create this layer is available [in the Southeast Blueprint 2025 Data Download] under > 6_Code. ­­DEFINING EXTENT The exterior boundary of the collection of subregions described above represents the [Southeast Blueprint extent] (which is exactly the same as the previous Blueprint 2023 and 2024 extents). Note: For more details on the mapping steps, code used to create this layer is available [in the Southeast Blueprint 2025 Data Download] or [Caribbean-only Southeast Blueprint 2025 Data Download] under > 6_Code. The final step of the code used to create the subregions exports the extent layer.