Data from: Habitat risk assessment for regional ocean planning in the U.S. Northeast and Mid-Atlantic

Coastal habitats provide important benefits to people, including habitat
for species targeted by fisheries and opportunities for tourism and
recreation. Yet, such human activities also can imperil these habitats and
undermine the ecosystem services they provide to people. Cumulative risk
assessment provides an analytical framework for synthesizing the influence
of multiple stressors across habitats and decision-support for balancing
human uses and ecosystem health. To explore cumulative risk to habitats in
the U.S. Northeast and Mid-Atlantic Ocean Planning regions, we apply the
open-source InVEST Habitat Risk Assessment model to 13 habitats and 31
stressors in an exposure-consequence framework. In doing so, we advance
the science priorities of EBM and both regional planning bodies by
synthesizing the wealth of available data to improve our understanding of
human uses and how they affect marine resources. We find that risk to
ecosystems is greatest first, along the coast, where a large number of
stressors occur in close proximity and secondly, along the continental
shelf, where fewer, higher consequence activities occur. Habitats at
greatest risk include soft and hard-bottom nearshore areas, tidal flats,
soft-bottom shelf habitat, and rocky intertidal zones—with the degree of
risk varying spatially. Across all habitats, our results indicate that
rising sea surface temperatures, commercial fishing, and shipping
consistently and disproportionally contribute to risk. Further, our
findings suggest that management in the nearshore will require
simultaneously addressing the temporal and spatial overlap as well as
intensity of multiple human activities and that management in the offshore
requires more targeted efforts to reduce exposure from specific threats.
We offer a transparent, generalizable approach to evaluating cumulative
risk to multiple habitats and illustrate the spatially heterogeneous
nature of impacts along the eastern Atlantic coast and the importance of
spatial scale in estimating such impacts. These results offer a valuable
decision-support tool by helping to constrain the decision space, focus
attention on habitats and locations at the greatest risk, and highlight
effect management strategies.