Massachusetts Nearshore Ocean Management Boundary Line

A boundary line defines the landward limit of the Ocean Management Planning Area for Massachusetts, established 0.3 nautical miles from the mean high water shoreline. The data set, provided by SCIOPS, includes official coordinate values and GIS shapefiles for this legal boundary. It was created pursuant to 'An Act Relative to Oceans' to regulate coastal development.

Use Cases

• Delineate the legal Ocean Management Planning Area using the official NOMPAB coordinate values for regulatory mapping.
• Analyze coastal embayment and harbor inclusion landward of the 0.3 nautical mile boundary for development impact studies.
• Integrate the boundary shapefile with other marine datasets for comprehensive spatial planning and GIS analysis.

Strengths

• Boundary is legally defined by Massachusetts' 'An Act Relative to Oceans', providing official authority.
• Includes both GIS shapefiles and calculated coordinate values as the official record for precision.

Limitations

• Exact row/feature count, file size, and temporal coverage of the underlying shoreline data are unknown.
• Spatial coverage is limited solely to the coastal waters of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Provenance

Source

SCIOPS

Collection Method

Derived from an approximate mean high water shoreline dataset, with manual digitization of closing lines for embayments.

Geography

Coastal waters of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, USA.