Species distribution modeling of deep sea sponges in the North Pacific Ocean.
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Ecology, Marine Biology, Spatial and Geographic Information Science, Biological Oceanography
- Keywords
- benthic sponges, Predictive modeling, ocean deoxygenation, hexactinellid sponges, climate changes, MaxEnt
- Copyright
- © 2018 Davidson
- 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 modeling of deep sea sponges in the North Pacific Ocean. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26815v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26815v1
Abstract
Knowledge of deep-sea species and their ecosystems is limited due to the inaccessibility of the areas and the prohibitive cost of conducting large-scale field studies. My graduate research has used predictive modeling methods to map hexactinellid sponge habitat extent in the North Pacific, as well as climate-induced changes in oceanic dissolved oxygen levels and how this will impact sponges. Results from a MaxEnt model based on sponge presence data from the eastern Pacific, in conjunction with bathymetric terrain derivatives, closely mapped existing sponge habitats, and suggested a depth threshold around 3000 meters below which sponges are not found. Early results suggest that oxygen is another important predictor of sponge habitat, including this and a variety of other environmental predictors (e.g. based on ocean chemistry, physics and biology) and different model scales would improve model accuracy. The long-term goal of this research is to apply climate prediction data to the predictive modeling in order to assess the sensitivity of deep-sea sponge habitat to global climate changes.
Author Comment
This is an abstract which has been accepted for the WCMB.