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Seafloor substrate (hard and soft bottom) maps at select islands and atolls in American Samoa, the Mariana Archipelago, and the Pacific Remote Island Areas

Published by Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce | Metadata Last Checked: April 12, 2026 | Last Modified: 2018-04-01T00:00:00.000+00:00
Seafloor substrate (i.e., hard vs. soft bottom) maps from 0 to up to 50 m depths around select islands and atolls in American Samoa, the Mariana Archipelago, and the Pacific Remote Island Areas were produced by the NOAA Fisheries Ecosystem Sciences Division (ESD). The islands and atolls include Tutuila, Ofu and Olosega, Tau, and Rose in American Samoa; Anatahan, Maug, Aguijan, Pagan, Rota, Tinian, Saipan, and Guam in the Mariana Archipelago; and Howland, Jarvis, Kingman, Palmyra, and Johnston in the Pacific Remote Island Areas. This is a preliminary product, derived from integrating two existing map products: hard and soft seafloor substrate maps derived from an unsupervised classification of multibeam backscatter and bathymetry derivatives produced by ESD, and shallow-water benthic habitat maps generated by the NOAA Centers for Coastal Ocean Science. The resulting maps were then updated with ESD's groundtruth data, including biological survey data and benthic cover data derived from the analysis of seafloor images. The final maps were interpolated to fill in gaps and smoothed to remove isolated pixels, and the substrate data were constrained up to 50-m depths. For the Pacific Remote Island Areas where no benthic habitat maps were available, hard and soft substrate maps were newly generated from high spatial resolution satellite images.

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