Species Distribution Models for sea pen corals in the Flemish Cap and Flemish Pass Area (NorthwestAtlantic Ocean)
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecosystem Science, Environmental Impacts
- Keywords
- Species Distribution Models, protection areas, seapens corals, Northwest Atlantic
- Copyright
- © 2018 Sacau Cuadrado et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Species Distribution Models for sea pen corals in the Flemish Cap and Flemish Pass Area (NorthwestAtlantic Ocean) PeerJ Preprints 6:e26687v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26687v1
Abstract
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.
Author Comment
This abstract tries to give an introduction to the implementation of SDMs for sea pen corals in the Flemish Cap and Flemish Pass using a 10 year period of bottom trawl survey data.