Bathymetry, backscatter intensity, and benthic habitat offshore of Cape Mendocino, California

Survey data collected for this data release were used to create maps of surficial geology and benthic habitat as part of the USGS California Seafloor Mapping Program, a collaboration with California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Funding was provided by the California Ocean Protection Council. These data are intended to provide regional bathymetric information in California State waters for offshore resource and ecosystem management. This data release is part of USGS Data Series 781 (Golden and Cochrane, 2019), which can be found at https://doi.org/10.3133/ds781. This part of the Data Series presents substrate, geomorphic, and geologic attributed polygons in the Offshore of Cape Mendocino, California, map area, one of 83 map areas of the California State Waters Map Series. The polygons are derived from multibeam echosounder (MBES) data and derivatives of that data using video-supervised and unsupervised classification. Habitat attributes are named following the Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (Federal Geographic Data Committee, 2012), and attribute values conform to that standard in order to be useful for national ecosystems management.