Nearshore areas within Long Island Sound are of great interest to the Connecticut and New York research and resource management communities because of their ecological, recreational, and commercial importance. Although advances in multibeam echosounder technology permit the construction of high-resolution representations of sea-floor topography in deeper waters, limitations inherent in collecting fixed-angle multibeam data make using this technology in shallower waters (less than 10 meters deep) difficult and expensive. These limitations have often resulted in data gaps between areas for which multibeam bathymetric datasets are available and the adjacent shoreline.

To address this problem, the geospatial datasets released in this report seamlessly integrate complete-coverage multibeam bathymetric data acquired off New London and Niantic Bay, Connecticut, with hydrographic Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) data acquired along the nearshore. The result is a more continuous sea-floor representation and a much smaller gap between the digital bathymetric data and the shoreline than previously available. These datasets are provided online and on CD-ROM in Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) raster-grid and GeoTIFF formats in order to facilitate access, compatibility, and utility.