Distribution of mangroves in the Galapagos islands, GIS and Google Earth layers

We provide here the most accurate cover for mangrove forests in the Galapagos Islands. We mapped mangroves using freely available Google Earth Very High Resolution images based on on-screen classification. The mangrove cover corresponds to 2014 since the images we used were mostly from this year. We obtained an area of 3657.1 ha of fringing mangrove that covers 35% of the coastline. Eighty percent of mangrove cover is found in Isabela island, and 90% in the western and central south-eastern bioregions. The overall accuracy of mangrove classification was 99.1% with a Kappa coefficient of 0.97 when validated with field data. The mapped mangrove forests are composed by three species of mangroves, Rhizophora mangle (red mangrove, Fam. Rhizophoraceae), Avicennia germinans (black mangrove, Fam. Acanthaceae) and Laguncularia racemosa (white mangrove, Fam. Combretaceae); and occasionally Conocarpus erectus (button or buttonwood mangrove, Fam. Combretaceae) although we do not differentiate species in our layer, we map the mangrove assemblage. The GIS layer has a relative scale of 1:2500± 125. This publication is contribution number 2235DS of the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands.