An exclusive economic zone (EEZ)
is a sea zone prescribed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of
the Sea over which a sovereign state has special rights over the
exploration and use of marine resources, including energy production
from water and wind. The 200 NM zone is measured, country-by-country, from
another maritime boundary, the baseline (usually but not in all cases
the mean low-water mark, used is not the same thing as the coast line. For
each country, the official list of the baseline points is obtained from the United
Nations Law of the Sea Maritime Space (http://www.un.org/depts/los/LEGISLATIONANDTREATIES/regionslist.htm).
The data for this layer were
obtained from http://www.marineregions.org/eezmethodology.php.
The Preferred Citation for this data is Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) (2014), Maritime
Boundaries Geodatabase, version 8 in conjunction with NOAA. The exclusive
economic zone (EEZ) limits and boundaries were created for NOAA's purposes only
to update the charted maritime limits and maritime boundaries on NOAA charts and
for official depiction, please see NOAA's paper or raster nautical charts (Sourced
from NOAA_Version 4.1, 9/10/2013). NOAA provides shapefiles of the
Exclusive Economic Zones for different regions of the United States and its
overseas territories. In a second phase the database of negotiated treaties
from the United Nations Law of the Sea was consulted and imported into a GIS.
The geographic coordinates from the documents were converted to decimal degrees
and imported into a database. After importing them in ArcGIS, the points were
connected by a line. The remaining boundaries were calculated in a GIS
in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea: a 200
Nautical Mile buffer was drawn from the baseline or a median line between 2
countries was calculated.
