The Habitat Digitizer Extension to ArcView 3.1 was designed to use a hierarchical classification scheme to delineate habitats by visually interpreting georeferenced images such as aerial photographs, satellite images, and side scan sonar. The extension allows users to create custom classification schemes and rapidly delineate and attribute polygons, lines, and points using simple menus. Originally, the extension was created to classify tropical marine habitats. However, the extension now allows new hierarchical classification schemes to be easily created, modified, and saved for use on future mapping projects. There are several advantages to using classification schemes with a hierarchical structure including: the detail of habitat categories can be expanded or collapsed to suit user needs, the thematic accuracy of each category/hierarchical level can be determined, and additional categories can be easily added or deleted at any level of the scheme to suit user needs. The classification scheme included with this extension (coral.hcs) was used to create the habitat shapefiles for the "Benthic Habitats of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands".

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VERSION HISTORY

3.1 - 7 March 2002. Added line and point attribution capability. Fixed bugs in Change Attributes dialog.

3.0.2 - 7 July 2001. Fixes a bug in the Add Field dialog box and removes a testing procedure in the Change Attribute dialog.

3.0.1 - 5 March 2001. Fixes a problem in the attribute selection dialog. If there were two subcategories with the same name in different categories, all attributes one level further down in both subcategories were listed.

3.0 - 7 January 2001. Initial public release.