Great Lakes Straits of Mackinac Parks and Managed Areas for Oil Spill Sensitivity

The Great Lakes Straits of Mackinac and adjacent lands and waters in northern Michigan are represented in this geospatial dataset. It contains vector polygons for parks and managed areas, including national forests, marine sanctuaries, and wildlife refuges, as part of the 2019 Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI) data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The ESI data characterize coastal environments by their sensitivity to spilled oil.

Use Cases

• Mapping protected area boundaries for environmental impact assessments based on the polygon data for parks and refuges.
• Modeling oil spill sensitivity and risk for coastal habitats based on the dataset's ESI framework.
• Integrating human-use resource data with biological and shoreline layers for comprehensive coastal planning.
• Analyzing the spatial distribution of different management area types (e.g., national forests, military installations) within the study area.

Strengths

• Data is part of a standardized Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI) framework for oil spill planning.
• Includes a specific set of human-use resources such as national parks, state protected areas, and wildlife refuges.
• Spatial data is designed to be used with related stand-alone attribute tables (SOC_DAT and SOURCES).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.

Provenance

Source

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce

Collection Method

Likely compiled from federal, state, and local agency sources for the 2019 ESI assessment.

Time Range

2019

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 22:29:49.367455; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Great Lakes Straits of Mackinac, nearby portions of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, and adjacent lands and waters in northern Michigan.