Ocean Pollution (Shipping Lanes, Ports) 2008 - KNB

This data layer combines estimates of pollution coming from commercial shipping and from ports. As such, it is a combination of the shipping and port volume data layers, with the port volume data plumed to estimate pollution from commercial ports (with exponential decline in intensity from the port). Ocean-based pollution is assumed to derive from commercial and recreational ship activity. No data on global recreational ship activity currently exist, and therefore we modelled this driver to oceans using a combination of the commercial shipping traffic data and port data. The shipping data provide an estimate of the occurrence of ships at a particular location, and therefore an estimate of the amount of pollution they produce (via fuel leaks, oil discharge, waste disposal, etc.) that is unique from their contribution to ship strikes, etc. described above. We recognize that ocean currents can disperse this pollution into untraveled regions, but small-scale oceanography is known for only a few select locations around the world, and pollutants are likely to be most concentrated in high traffic areas. The dispersal of port-derived pollution was modelled as a diffusive plume with a maximum distance of 100 km. These plumes were not clipped to shallow regions as was done for Invasive Species. Raw stressor data from "Benjamin Halpern, Melanie Frazier, John Potapenko, Kenneth Casey, Kellee Koenig, et al. 2015. Cumulative human impacts: raw stressor data (2008 and 2013). Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. doi:10.5063/F1S180FS."