AKMaritimeNWR

Tags  Alaska Maritime, National Wildlife Refuge, NWR, USFWS, FWS, boundary, generalized, unofficial

Summary

These polygons depict simplified boundaries of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge for quick reference.

Description

This feature class was generalized from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cadastral data, specifically the Approved Acquisition Boundaries (available at https://ecos.fws.gov/ServCat/Reference/Profile/131755). A subset of this national data set was first exported to include only features within the Alaska Region. This new feature class was then projected to a local coordinate system, NAD83 Alaska Albers. 
Polygons representing Alaska Maritime NWR were exported to a new feature class, which was simplified using a combination of manual edits and Esri's geoprocessing tools. The final feature class contains 12 polygons, the largest of which has 495 vertices. Prior to exporting as geoJSON, the feature class was projected from NAD83 Alaska Albers to WGS 84.
Since Alaska Maritime NWR includes thousands of small islands, the first simplification step was to remove small polygon features less than 10 square kilometers. Then, neighboring polygons (within 95 kilometers of one another) were grouped using Esri's Aggregate Polygons tool. The output required some manual edits to remove vertices where sharp, dramatic points had been created (presumably due to small islands pulling polygon features in odd directions). This aggregated feature class was then simplified using Esri's Simplify Polygon tool, with a simplification tolerance of 1 kilometer and the Weighted Area simplification algorithm and a minimum area of 10 square kilometers. The output was further simplified using Esri's Smooth Polygon tool, with a 45-kilometer tolerance and the PAEK smoothing algorithm. Finally, manual edits were made to avoid overlap with adjacent refuge boundaries (Kodiak NWR, Izembek NWR, and Alaska Peninsula NWR).
This feature class depicts simplified boundaries of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge and warrants the following limitations:
 1) must not be used for official or legal  purposes such as acreage computations or the field location of Refuge boundaries.
 2) intended to be used only for small-scale (<1:5,000,000) depiction of the Refuge boundaries.
If you require the official, full-resolution boundaries of the National Wildlife Refuges in Alaska, you may download them at https://www.fws.gov/r7/nwr/Realty/data/LandMappers/Public/Help/HTML/NationalWildlifeRefugeandWildern.html

Credits

USFWS, Alaska Region

Use limitations

For small-scale, general use/depiction of Refuge boundaries. Do not use for official or legal purposes. Do not use for legal or official acreage computations.

Extent

Scale Range