Carpinteria Salt Marsh Habitat Polygons

We identified five common habitat types in Carpinteria Salt Marsh: channels, pans (flats), marsh, salt flat and upland. We then drew polygons around each habitat type identified from a registered and orthorectified aerial photograph and created a GIS shapefile. Polygons were ground-truthed in the field. From these habitat polygons, one can use GIS applications to estimate the area of each habitat type in this estuary. These data support the following publications: Kuris, Armand M., et al. "Ecosystem energetic implications of parasite and free-living biomass in three estuaries." Nature 454.7203 (2008): 515-518. Hechinger, Ryan F., Kevin D. Lafferty, Andy P. Dobson, James H. Brown, and Armand M. Kuris. "A common scaling rule for abundance, energetics, and production of parasitic and free-living species." Science 333, no. 6041 (2011): 445-448. Hechinger, Ryan F., Kevin D. Lafferty, John P. McLaughlin, Brian L. Fredensborg, Todd C. Huspeni, Julio Lorda, Parwant K. Sandhu et al. "Food webs including parasites, biomass, body sizes, and life stages for three California/Baja California estuaries." Ecology 92, no. 3 (2011): 791-791. Buck, J.C., Hechinger, R.F., Wood, A.C., Stewart, T.E., Kuris, A.M., and Lafferty, K.D., "Host density increases parasite recruitment but decreases host risk in a snail-trematode system." Manuscript submitted for publication. Lafferty, K.D., Stewart, T.E., and Hechinger, R.F. (in press). Bird distribution surveys at Carpinteria Salt Marsh, California USA, January 2012 to March 2013: U.S. Geological Survey data release, http://dx.doi.org/10.5066/F7F47M95.