Astute Spruce

Enhanced Exploration tools for Estuaries along the West Coast of the United States

Estuaries are unique ecosystems where rivers and streams meet the ocean. They provide essential habitat to many aquatic and marine species. In particular, they provide nursery habitat for several key species along the West Coast of the United States.

The West Coast Estuaries Explorer provides an easy-to-use data-driven tool for exploring information about estuaries along the West Coast of the United States. Our primary goal was to make information about these estuaries more easily accessible, and leverage recent work to map the extent of estuaries using high-resolution data sources.

This tool allows users to:

• explore and find estuaries along the West Coast
• visualize the location and types of biotic habitat within these estuaries
• easily filter estuaries by characteristics such as size and species present
• explore information about tidal wetland loss and restoration

I originally worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperative and the Pacific Marine and Estuarine Fish Habitat Partnership to create this tool during 2017-2018 while I was at the Conservation Biology Institute (CBI). We then enhanced this tool further during 2019 to add additional information and functionality around tidal wetland loss.

Astute Spruce is a real pleasure to work with. Brendan is a truly impressive technical expert that listens carefully, suggests a range of solutions and reliably follows through on projects. He has a knack for distilling complex datasets and building clean, responsive and intuitive web mapping and data visualization applications. I highly recommend engaging Brendan early on in a project to take advantage of his insights from the start.

-- Van Hare, Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission