Marine habitats of the Madang Lagoon, Papua New Guina

Background [Modified extract from related publications] The overall goal of the study was to simulate the design of hypothetical reserves that would protect marine habitat types within the Riwo waters (a coastal community in the Madang Lagoon), while minimizing loss of access by the community to important ecosystem services and benefits. Therefore, spatial data on habitat types present in the region were necessary, as well as maps of the benefits provided by the Madang Lagoon as perceived by the community. This dataset corresponds to habitat maps covering the Madang Lagoon, Papua New Guinea.
Methods [Modified extract] We created a habitat map of the Madang Lagoon from a high spatial resolution (2 m) Worldview satellite image captured on 12/06/2010. The map was created following the steps in the “user approach” described in Andrefouet, 2008: a priori manual delineation of habitats, ground truthing data collected separately in 2012 from this project during the Coral-Triangle cruise on board R/V ALIS (Andréfouët 2012), contextual editing, classification and merging of habitat segments. The resulting hierarchical habitat typology for the Madang Lagoon describes 4 levels of geomorphic habitats, and 2 levels of benthic habitats (current at the time of the benthic survey, 2012).
Data sources acknowledgement:

Andréfouët S. Coral reef habitat mapping using remote sensing: A user vs producer perspective. Implications for research, management and capacity building. Journal of Spatial Science. 2008;53(1):113-29. doi: 10.1080/14498596.2008.9635140. PubMed PMID: WOS:000258303000011.
Andréfouët S. CORAL-TRIANGLE cruise, RV Alis. 2012.

This dataset consists of 1 .zip archive containing an ESRI Shapefile (one set of 8 related files in total) with habitat polygons, covering the Madang Lagoon, Papua New Guinea. The attribute table for this shapefile contains code labels and descriptions (attributes) for each marine habitat type, at 6 different levels of detail.