Annual California Sea Otter Census: 2019 Range Extent Shapefile
Description
The GIS shapefile Range extent of southern sea otters 2019.shp is a simple polyline representing the geographic distribution of the southern sea otter (Enhydra lutris nereis) in mainland California, based on data collected during the spring 2019 range-wide census. The USGS range-wide sea otter census has been undertaken each year since 1982, using consistent methodology involving both ground-based and aerial-based counts. The spring provides the primary basis for gauging population trends by State and Federal management agencies. Sea otter distribution in California (the mainland range) is considered to comprise a band of potential habitat stretching along the coast of California, and bounded to the north and south by range limits defined by combining independent otters within a moving window of 10-kilometer stretches of coastline (as measured along the 10-meter bathymetric contour; 20 contiguous ATOS intervals each) and taking the northern and southern ATOS values, respectively, of the northernmost and southernmost stretches in which at least five otters were counted for at least 2 consecutive spring surveys during the last 3 years.
Resources
| Name |
Format |
Description |
Link |
|
55 |
Landing page for access to the data |
https://doi.org/10.5066/P9B2KNB3 |
|
55 |
The metadata original format |
https://data.usgs.gov/datacatalog/metadata/USGS.5d85427ce4b0c4f70d086f23.xml |
Tags
- environment
- sea-otter-census
- southern-california-coastal
- distribution
- biota
- central-california-coastal
- sea-otters
- biogeography
- mammals
- ocean
- california
- usgs-5d85427ce4b0c4f70d086f23
- aerial-counts
- range
- shore-counts