The shoreline was created from data captured (digitized from scanned images of the master separates of the NOS Charts) from over 270 National Ocean Service Navigation Charts and spans some 80,000 nautical miles at an average map scale of 1:70,000.
This product created by the Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEA) Division of NOAA's Office of Ocean Resources Conservation and Assessment comprises over 75,000 nautical miles of coastline (nearly 2.5 million vertices), representing the entire conterminous United States of America. Alaska, the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico, and all other interests and territories of the United States are not included in the collection.
The data set is designed for a broad target audience ranging from governmental agencies, universities and other research institutions, to the private sector, and students, as well as any other concern requiring a general purpose digital shoreline layer for GIS and cartographic projects.