In 2011, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) was awarded a grant from the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NALCC) to apply a classification scheme for marine habitats, the Coastal Marine and Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS), at multiple scales. The recently completed project, Application of the Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standards (CMECS) in the Northeast, tested the utility of the classification standard in crosswalking and mapping legacy classified benthic habitat data at the local, subregional and regional scales.

In the Northeast United States, efforts are underway to better organize and integrate spatial marine data to support ocean planning and management efforts. An important step in this process is translating existing data with varying purposes, sources, methodologies, and optimal scales of application to a common language, so heterogeneous data can be viewed in a common, region-wide framework to better facilitate decision-making.

The need for an inclusive and standardized approach to classifying marine habitats throughout the United States resulted in the development of CMECS, which provides a common language for the terminology of existing schemes and allows for consistent crosswalking to a common schema.

With funding from the NALCC, TNC crosswalked 40 existing classification schemes to CMECS from local (1:5,000), subregional (1:250,000), and regional (1:5,000,000) scaled datasets and provided maps for a select few schemes/datasets. At the local scale (small scale estuary-specific) they investigated high-resolution benthic information for Boston Harbor (Massachusetts). At the subregional scale, the tested datasets were those assembled for marine spatial planning efforts in Rhode Island and adjacent federal waters as well as representative schemes from Maine, New Hampshire and Connecticut. At the regional scale, the classification was applied to TNC's Benthic Habitat Model from the Northwest Atlantic Marine Ecoregional Assessment (NAMERA) and the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Classification (NERRSC) scheme.

The results of this project will be useful in understanding how the standard can be used to maximize the utility of existing data and in developing methods to aid in crosswalking, particularly as CMECS continues to evolve. More information about CMECS and the final report and supplementary crosswalk table spreadsheet for this project are available on the TNC Conservation Gateway.