Mapping marine biomes of the world
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Abstract
There is no global map of marine biomes, i.e., areas characterized by similar habitat forming plant life forms. We defined five marine biomes; seagrass, kelp, mangroves, zooxanthellate corals, and saltmarshes. We mapped seagrass and kelp biomes using species distribution modeling (MaxEnt) of species occurrence records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the United Nations Environment Programme-World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) Ocean Data Viewer. Environmental data layers were extracted from Global Marine Environment Datasets (GMED) and interpolated into 30 arc seconds resolution. The resulting MaxEnt model predicted a similar geographical distribution to the occurrence records. In addition, it mapped areas where previous maps lacked data and predicted seagrass occupies 1,646,788 km2. This map will be combined with maps of kelp, coral, and mangrove biomes to show the spatial extent of marine biomes for use in global carbon budgets and design Marine Protected Area networks.
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2018. Mapping marine biomes of the world. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26635v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26635v1Author comment
This is an abstract which has been accepted for the WCMB.
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Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Dinusha Rasanjalee Jayathilake conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Mark John Costello prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
The research in this article did not generate any data or code.
Funding
The authors received no funding for this work. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.