Species Distribution Models for sea pen corals in the Flemish Cap and Flemish Pass Area (NorthwestAtlantic Ocean)

Species Distribution Models (SDMs) are widely used to identify species-environmentrelationships and predicting species occurrence and/or density at un-sampled locations.The SDMs implementation allows describing species geographical trends, toidentify spatial ontogenetic shifts of commercially exploited species and to assessthe effect of climate change on species distribution. Moreover, SDMs could bean essential tool to support the marine spatial planning framework providingessential and easy-to-use interpretation tools, such as predictive distributionmaps, with the final aim of improving manag... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Sacau Cuadrado, Mar
Garcia-Alegre Garralda, Ana
Pennino, Maria Grazia
Murillo Pérez, Francisco Javier
Serrano López, Alberto
Durán Muñoz, Pablo
Dokumenttyp: posted-content
Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
Verlag/Hrsg.: PeerJ
Sprache: unknown
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26701384
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : http://dx.doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26687

Species Distribution Models (SDMs) are widely used to identify species-environmentrelationships and predicting species occurrence and/or density at un-sampled locations.The SDMs implementation allows describing species geographical trends, toidentify spatial ontogenetic shifts of commercially exploited species and to assessthe effect of climate change on species distribution. Moreover, SDMs could bean essential tool to support the marine spatial planning framework providingessential and easy-to-use interpretation tools, such as predictive distributionmaps, with the final aim of improving management and conservation especially ofvulnerable species as sea pen corals. In this study, a 10-yr period (2007-2017) of a bottom trawl survey was used to estimateand predict the suitability habitat of sea pen species as a function of several environmental variables (i.e. bathymetry, sea bottom temperature, sea bottom salinity, slope, rugosity, aspectof the seabed, etc) in Flemish Cap and Flemish Pass (ATLAS Case Study No 11) using different SDM algorithms. Resultsshow that species exhibit specific habitat preferences and spatial patterns inresponse to environmental variables.