Description: <DIV STYLE="text-align:Left;"><DIV><DIV><P><SPAN>This layer was created under the Inter-American Development Bank funded Ecosystem-based Development for Andros Island, The Bahamas Project which applied an innovative spatial analysis tool (a suite of ecosystem service models housed in the InVEST open-source software) to put a value on ecosystem services in Andros based on their contribution to productive sectors (tourism, fisheries) and basic services (coastal protection, water). The models are populated with a variety ecological, geophysical, economic and social data, including bonefish habitat. </SPAN></P><P><SPAN>The bonefish habitat around Andros essentially includes all water and creeks out to 1 to 3 meters deep. This layer represents a very inclusive view of bonefish habitat around the outer shoreline of Andros, a larger area of bonefish habitat than what was considered in the Andros Conservation Action Plan (CAP) in 2006. However, in comparison to the inner mud areas and smaller creeks, this layer is less inclusive of bonefish habitat compared to that of the bonefish habitat used in the Andros CAP in 2006. The 2006 Andros CAP used land cover classes mud and creeks (with and without exits) that were mapped through the interpretation of LandSat imagery. This layer also used creeks to represent bonefish habitat, first extracted from the land use and land cover product for Andros by the Natural Capital Project under the Ecosystem-based Development for Andros Island, The Bahamas Project. The original land cover and land use product was derived from 5-m RapidEye imagery acquired in October and November, 2009 through the Global Environmental Facility-funded Integrating Watershed and Coastal Area Management in Caribbean Small Island Developing States (GEF-IWCAM) Project in 2010. Per-pixel classification was performed with a supervised, Random Forests classifier. Smaller creeks and streams were then removed basked on data that represented creeks without exits by the Nature Conservancy (TNC). The outer shoreline section was derived from bathymetry information digitized from nautical charts by TNC.</SPAN></P><P><SPAN>This layer was furthered refined by attributing the critical bonefish habitats as identified in 2006 during a rapid ecological assessment (REA) of the westside of Andros. </SPAN></P></DIV></DIV></DIV>