Protected Areas - Marine
USGS Gap Analysis Program (GAP) translated official (member and eligible) MPAs from the NOAA MPA Inventory (March 2010) into the Protected Areas Database of the United States (PADUS) schema, applied conservation measures and identified overlaps between MPAs and PADUS to support conservation assessments and planning. The NOAA MPA Inventory (http://www.mpa.gov/) is a comprehensive catalog that provides detailed information for existing marine protected areas in the United States. This Inventory consists of original boundaries as represented by the managing agencies, including terrestrial components of those protected areas. Only the sub-tidal area of Member and Eligible MPAs meet the definition of a MPA as, "any area of the marine environment that has been reserved by federal, state, territorial, tribal, or local laws or regulations to provide lasting protection for part or all of the natural and cultural resources therein." The inventory provides geospatial boundary information (in polygon format) and classification attributes that seek to define the conservation objectives, protection level, governance and related management criteria for all sites in the database. To complement PADUS Core Attributes, GAP transferred many marine specific attributes from the NOAA MPA Inventory into the PADUS geodatabase. The NOAA MPA Inventory is used to inform the development of the national system of marine protected areas as required by Executive Order 13158. GAP included MPAs to complement the more terrestrially based PADUS to provide governments and stakeholders with access to information to make conservation decisions.
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