Global Ecological Coastal Units

The Global Coastline dataset is high-resolution map of the Earth's coastlines and a standardized global inventory of the ecological settings in which coastlines occur. It contains over 4 million 1 km or shorter coastal segments, each attributed with values from ten ecological settings representing the adjacent ocean, the adjacent land, and the coastline itself. The coastal segments were also classified into 81,000 coastal segment units (CSUs) using a unique combination of the values of the ten ecological settings from the Coastal and Marine Ecosystem Classification Standard (CMECS). And the 4 million segments were also clustered into a set of 16 global coastline groups which are similar in the aggregate ecological setting described by the ten variables.