geonode:AquaMaps_Species_Richness_Elasmobranchs0 AquaMaps is a tool for generating model-based, large-scale predictions of natural occurrences of species. For marine species, the model uses estimates of environmental preferences with respect to depth, water temperature, salinity, primary productivity, and association with sea ice or coastal areas. These estimates of species preferences, called environmental envelopes, are derived from large sets of occurrence data available from online collection databases such as GBIF (www.gbif.org) and OBIS (www.iobis.org), and from independent knowledge from the literature about the distribution of a given species and its habitat usage that are available in FishBase (and in SeaLifeBase and AlgaeBase for non-fish). The environmental envelopes are matched against local environmental conditions to determine the suitability of a given area in the ocean for a particular species. Predictions of relative probabilities of species occurrence are shown as color- coded species range maps in a global grid of half-degree latitude and longitude cell dimensions. The maps are displayed on the web through the use of C-squares Mapper developed at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Australia (Rees 2002, 2003). The AquaMaps approach of incorporating species occurrences and expert knowledge into an environmental envelope is modified from an ecological niche model originally developed by Kaschner et al. (2006) for predicting global distributions of marine mammals. It is specifically applied to correct for biases in occurrence data such as non-representative coverage of a species’ distribution, biases in sampling effort and data provision, and species misidentifications. Further, this approach is applicable to a wide range of marine organisms thus allowing AquaMaps modeling of both fish and non-fish species. AquaMaps_Species_Richness_Elasmobranchs features EPSG:4326 CRS:84 -84.0 21.0 -61.5 80.5 other other text/xml other other other other