Introduction:
NOAA’s National Coastal Assessment and Data Synthesis (CA&DS) provides a systematic framework that integrates data such as eutrophication conditions, pollutant sources and loadings, population, sediment contamination, and others that are consistently formatted using a hierarchical set of spatial units defined by the Coastal Assessment Framework (CAF).
The CAF was developed in the mid-1990s by NOAA's Special Projects Office to allow characterization of entire watersheds in the U.S., both coastal and upstream portion, with a nested hierarchy of spatial units for the small- and large-scale coastal resource data analyses needed to effectively manage out nation's diverse data resources.
The CAF encompasses nearly 83 percent of the land areas within the contiguous United States and includes the drainage basins of nearly all of the nation's rivers.
The CAF includes coastal and estuarine drainage areas along the nation's coasts and upstream fluvial drainage areas. The CAF is composed of 124 Estuarine and Sub-estuarine Drainage Areas (EDAs), 43 Fluvial Drainage Areas (FDAs), 285 Coastal Drainage Areas (CDAs), and 15 Fluvial components of Coastal Drainage Areas (FCDAs).
An Estuarine Drainage Area (EDA) is that component of an estuary's entire watershed that empties directly into the estuary and is affected by tides. EDAs may be composed of all or part of a single or several USGS hydrologic units and include all or part of the USGS cataloging unit containing the most upstream extent of tidal influence (head-of-tide).
A Coastal Drainage Area (CDA) is defined as that component of an entire watershed that meets the following three criteria: 1) it is not part of any EDA; 2) it drains directly into an ocean, an estuary, or the Great Lakes; and 3) it is composed only of the downstream-most HUC in which the head-of-tide is found.
A Fluvial Drainage Area (FDA) is that component of an estuary's entire watershed upstream of the EDA boundary. FDAs have land components only. The huge 1,131,700 square mile Mississippi River FDA dwarfs all others, and makes up over half of the total drainage area covered by the entire CAF.
The Fluvial component of a Coastal Drainage Area (FCDA) is that component of a coastal watershed that lies "upstream" of the CDA boundary. Like FDAs, FCDAs only have a land component.
The CA&DS system is intended to provide the coastal stewardship community a capability to access, synthesize, assess, and apply nationwide data sets to priority coastal issues such as estuarine eutrophication, essential fish habitat, coastal monitoring, and sustainable development. The data available through this web site was originally compiled in the late 1990's. While there are no current plans to update this project much of the data may still be relevant.
