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This data has been clipped from the USA Critical Habitat layer on ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. It is intended for Esri tutorial purposes only and may not reflect the current state of critical habitat. Use the USA Critical Habitat layer for authoritative data.
In the United States, species in danger of extinction are protected by the Endangered Species Act. As part of these protections, the US Fish and Wildlife Service can designate critical habitat. Activities that are carried out, authorized, or funded by the federal government that are likely to adversely modify or destroy critical habitat are generally prohibited by the Endangered Species Act.
Because the Endangered Species Act prohibits federal actions that degrade critical habitat, limitations may be placed on land management and other projects. Proposed federal actions that may adversely modify or destroy critical habitat require that the agency or private entity proposing the action consult with the appropriate regulatory agency (US Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
The consultation and permitting process often relies heavily on GIS to organize, analyze, and display key information. This layer provides the information necessary to begin a landscape assessment of the distribution of critical habitat.
Dataset Summary
Phenomenon Mapped: Critical Habitat for Threatened and Endangered species.
Coordinate System: Web Mercator Auxiliary Sphere
Extent: 50 United States plus Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands
Visible Scale: The data is visible at all scales but draws best at scales larger than 1: 2,000,000
Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Publication Date: June 14, 2019
This layer displays critical habitat data (June 14, 2019) from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). The service contains 2 layers, lines and polygons, which correspond to the two shape files included in the original data. The source data for this layer are available here.
Esri modified the attributes of these data to facilitate their use. A Species Type field was added and populated denoting the taxonomic group of each species and a field was added to link to the USFWS species profile for each species. The scientific and common name fields were edited to standardize capitalization and remove special characters. Several fields that did not contain data were removed.
Attributes included in this layer are:
Common Name
Scientific Name
Species Type
Species Code
Population Code
Critical Habitat Status - Final or Proposed
Federal Register Publication Citation - The pop-ups for this field are pre-configured to link to the Federal Register search page for this value.
Federal Register Publication Date
Listing Status - Threatened, Endangered, Proposed Threatened, or Proposed Endangered
Link to USFWS Species Profile
What can you do with this layer?
This layer is suitable for both visualization and analysis. It can be used in ArcGIS Online in web maps and applications and can be used in ArcGIS Desktop.
The feature service is symbolized on the status of the critical habitat for each species. In ArcGIS Online you can change symbology.
The data can also be filtered. For example selecting common name as the field and northern spotted owl as the value in the filter will return a map displaying only northern spotted owl critical habitat.
The data can be exported to a file geodatabase, a shape file or other format and downloaded using the Export Data button on the top right of the description page.
This layer is part of the Living Atlas of the World that provides an easy way to explore the landscape layers and many other beautiful and authoritative maps on hundreds of topics.