he 33 deepwater bioregions for the Solomon Islands were condensed into 26 bioregions. The major changes were made to the northwestern side of the Solomon Islands EEZ; there was general agreement about the deepwater bioregions in the southeastern half of the country. Bioregions 120, 164, 167, 192, 244, and 304 were merged with Bioregion 222. Bioregion 226 was split into two halves, and one part of the non-contiguous Bioregion 240 (the part closer to the islands) was merged with 222.
The Institute for Marine Remote Sensing (IMaRS) at the University of South Florida (USF) was funded by the Oceanography Program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to provide an exhaustive worldwide inventory of coral reefs using high-resolution satellite imagery. By using a consistent dataset of high-resolution (30 meter) multispectral Landsat 7 images acquired between 1999 and 2002, USF characterized, mapped and estimated the extent of shallow coral reef ecosystems in the main coral reef provinces (Caribbean-Atlantic, Pacific, Indo-Pacific, Red Sea).
