Biscayne National Park Map Merge Project

Davis, Andy

Biscayne National Park (BISC) released a draft General Management Plan (GMP) in 2011 that identifies alternatives for future management prescriptions within BISC. While these alternatives are focused on enhancing the condition of natural resources, each alternative will impact resources differently. The South Florida / Caribbean Network (SFCN) of the National Park Service (NPS) supported this effort by quantifying levels of natural resource affected by each alternative presented in the GMP. This project accomplished three goals to that end. The first objective was to perform an accuracy assessment of a benthic map covering the inshore portion of Biscayne Bay, produced by PhotoScience, Inc. in 2009. Contemporary Braun-Blanquet data and remote sensing imagery were used to perform this step. The second objective was to merge the inshore map with a terrestrial and a marine offshore map using ESRI ArcGIS v. 10 to produce a complete map of the marine ecosystems in the park. The final objective was to use the comprehensive GIS product to conduct a geospatial analysis of five alternative GMP management proposals. The analysis determined the extent to which each GMP alternative will impact discrete ecosystems and communities.