Introduction:

NOAA’s National Coastal Assessment and Data Synthesis (CA&DS) provides a systematic

framework that integrates data such as eutrophication conditions, pollutant sources and

loadings, population, sediment contamination, and others that are consistently formatted using a

hierarchical set of spatial units defined by the Coastal Assessment Framework (CAF).

The CAF was developed in the mid-1990s by NOAA's Special Projects Office to allow

characterization of entire watersheds in the U.S., both coastal and upstream portion, with a

nested hierarchy of spatial units for the small- and large-scale coastal resource data analyses

needed to effectively manage out nation's diverse data resources.

The CAF encompasses nearly 83 percent of the land areas within the contiguous United States

and includes the drainage basins of nearly all of the nation's rivers.

The CAF includes coastal and estuarine drainage areas along the nation's coasts and upstream

fluvial drainage areas. The CAF is composed of 124 Estuarine and Sub-estuarine Drainage Areas

(EDAs), 43 Fluvial Drainage Areas (FDAs), 285 Coastal Drainage Areas (CDAs), and 15 Fluvial

components of Coastal Drainage Areas (FCDAs).

An Estuarine Drainage Area (EDA) is that component of an estuary's entire watershed that

empties directly into the estuary and is affected by tides. EDAs may be composed of all or part of

a single or several USGS hydrologic units and include all or part of the USGS cataloging unit

containing the most upstream extent of tidal influence (head-of-tide).

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A Coastal Drainage Area (CDA) is defined as that component of an entire watershed that

meets the following three criteria: 1) it is not part of any EDA; 2) it drains directly into an

ocean, an estuary, or the Great Lakes; and 3) it is composed only of the downstream-most HUC

in which the head-of-tide is found.

A Fluvial Drainage Area (FDA) is that component of an estuary's entire watershed upstream

of the EDA boundary. FDAs have land components only. The huge 1,131,700 square mile

Mississippi River FDA dwarfs all others, and makes up over half of the total drainage area

covered by the entire CAF.

The Fluvial component of a Coastal Drainage Area (FCDA) is that component of a coastal

watershed that lies "upstream" of the CDA boundary. Like FDAs, FCDAs only have a land

component.

The CA&DS system is intended to provide the coastal stewardship community a capability to

access, synthesize, assess, and apply nationwide data sets to priority coastal issues such as

estuarine eutrophication, essential fish habitat, coastal monitoring, and sustainable

development. The data available through this web site was originally compiled in the late 1990's.

While there are no current plans to update this project much of the data may still be relevant.

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