Living Waters Core Habitats is one of two datalayers resulting from the Living Waters project (see also the NHESP Living Waters Critical Supporting Watershed datalayer description). Core Habitats represent lakes, ponds, rivers, and streams that are important for the protection of freshwater biodiversity in Massachusetts. Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program biologists delineated Core Habitats for rare aquatic species and exemplary aquatic habitats using Natural Heritage Element Occurrences along with other field data sets. The Core Habitats were “heads-up” digitized (drawn on screen) by the biologists in ArcView 3.2 at a 1:25,000 scale or larger. Areas of overlap among the individual species or community habitat areas were merged together to create the aggregate Core Habitat polygons in this coverage.
MassGIS stores this polygon layer in ArcSDE as LWCORE_POLY.
