Cumulative human impact maps for the Bay of Fundy and Scotian Shelf

DFO Maritimes Region has conducted a cumulative human impact mapping analysis for the Scotian Shelf-Bay of Fundy management area to support ongoing Marine Spatial Planning initiatives (Murphy et al. 2024). Cumulative human impact mapping (CIM) combines spatial information on human activities and habitats with a matrix of vulnerability weights, into an intuitive relative ‘cumulative impact score’ that shows where cumulative human impacts are greatest and least. To map cumulative impacts in DFO’s Maritimes Region, a recently developed ecosystem vulnerability assessment for Atlantic Canadian waters (Murray et al. 2022) was combined with spatial information on 21 different habitat types and 45 human activities across five different sectors (climate change, land-based, marine-based, coastal, commercial fishing) following the methodology from Halpern et al. (2008). An uncertainty analysis of the cumulative impact map was conducted to assess the robustness of results and identify hot and cold spots of cumulative impacts. This dataset provides: 1) cumulative impact maps for the DFO Maritimes Region at 1 km2 resolution: a total cumulative impact map (i.e. including all 45 human…

Publisher

Fisheries and Oceans Canada

Resources

7

Catalogue metadata updated

2026-03-24