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

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:

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.