What and where? Identifying high-risk aquatic invasive species and hotspots of suitable habitat in the Arctic

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1 Maurice Lamontagne Institute, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Mont-Joli, Quebec, Canada
2 Faculté des sciences et de génie, Laval University, Quebec, Quebec, Canada
3 Freshwater Institute, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.26752v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Biodiversity, Ecology, Marine Biology, Climate Change Biology
Keywords
Species distribution modelling, climate change, Invasive species, Risk assessment, Canadian Arctic
Copyright
© 2018 Goldsmit 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
Goldsmit J, Mckindsey C, Archambault P, Howland K. 2018. What and where? Identifying high-risk aquatic invasive species and hotspots of suitable habitat in the Arctic. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26752v1

Abstract

The risk of aquatic invasive species (AIS) introductions in the Arctic is expected to increase with ongoing trends of greater shipping activity, resource exploitation, and climate warming in the region. We identified a suite of AIS (benthos, zooplankton and macroalgae) with the greatest likelihood of introduction and impact in the Canadian Arctic using the Canadian Marine Invasive Screening Tool. The top sixteen riskiest species (mainly benthic) were then modelled to predict the potential spatial distributions (habitat modelling using Maximum Entropy) at an Arctic scale. Modelling was conducted under present environmental conditions and under two future global warming scenarios (2050 and 2100). Results show that hotspots or regions where suitable habitat is more densely accumulated for modelled AIS are in the Hudson Complex, Chukchi / Eastern Bering Sea, and Barents / White Sea. Most taxonomic groups showed a trend for a positive poleward shift in the future, increasing from the present time to the end of the century. This approach will aid in the identification of present and future high-risk areas for AIS in response to global warming.

Author Comment

This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.