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This project is a cooperative effort among the National Ocean Service, National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment; the United States Geological Survey; the National Park Service; and the National Geophysical Data Center. The goal of this work was to develop coral reef mapping methods and compare the accuracy of benthic habitat maps generated from on-screen digitizing off of georeferenced color aerial photography, with maps digitized directly from hard copy photographs using a stereoplotter. Thematic accuracy of the Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands habitat maps was evaluated for the three most general habitat categories: unconsolidated sediment, submerged vegetation, and coral reef/hard bottom. Accuracy was estimated at two locations within the project area that included the full complement of habitat types, depth ranges, and water conditions representative of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. For this reason, the accuracy of maps measured at these two locations is assumed to be representative of map accuracy elsewhere in the project area. This approach, which focused in two small areas, enabled a statistically robust evaluation of thematic accuracy to be conducted without the logistic difficulty of collecting data for accuracy assessment over the entire project area.Comparison with the accuracy assessment data revealed very similar levels of thematic accuracy between the two maps. Overall accuracy was 93.6 percent (Kappa 0.93). Maps produced from on-screen digitizing were almost 100 percent accurate for the submerged vegetation and unconsolidated sediment categories but misclassified a small percentage of hardbottom sites as unconsolidated sediment. Similarly, the maps produced using the stereoplotter were 100 percent accurate at classifying submerged vegetation but misclassified a small percentage of hardbottom and unconsolidated sediment sites. These findings suggest that both of these mapping techniques result in acceptable levels of thematic accuracy for maps produced at this scale with this type of classification scheme.