Title

Global habitat suitability of deep-water Antipatharia

License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

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Abstract

Antipatharia are a diverse group of corals with many species found in deep water. Many Antipatharia are habitat for associates, have extreme longevity and some species can occur beyond 8500 m depth. As they are major constituents of 'coral gardens', which are Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs), knowledge of their distribution and environmental requirements is an important pre-requisite for informed conservation planning particularly where the expense and difficulty of deep-sea sampling prohibits comprehensive surveys.
This study uses a global database of Antipatharia distribution data to perform habitat suitability modelling using the Maxent methodology to estimate the global extent of black coral habitat suitability. The model of habitat suitability is driven by temperature but there is notable influence from other variables of topography, surface productivity and oxygen levels.
This model can be used to predict areas of suitable habitat, which can be useful for conservation planning. The global distribution of Antipatharia habitat suitability shows a marked contrast with the distribution of specimen observations, indicating that many potentially suitable areas have not been sampled, and that sampling effort has been disproportionate to shallow, accessible areas inside marine protected areas (MPAs). Although 25% of Antipatharia observations are located in MPAs, only 7-8% of predicted suitable habitat is protected, which is short of the Convention on Biological Diversity target to protect 10% of ocean habitats by 2020.

Publication Date

May 21, 2021, 10:19 a.m.

Type

Raster Data

Keywords

Antipatharia_Habitat_Suitability , CoralFISH , Ecosystem based management of corals, fish and fisheries in the deep waters of Europe and beyond , GeoTIFF , WCS

Category

geoscientificInformation

Regions

Global

Owner

jcleary

Group

Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab at Duke University

More info

-

Restrictions

CC-BY-3.0: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported

Language

English

Data Quality

The data set was checked for completeness, correctness, and consistency of metainformation. Validity of used methods was checked and - if applicable - precision and range of data.

Supplemental Information

This is a GIS layer (GeoTiff format) showing the predicted global habitat suitability for black corals (Antipatharia) in deep oceans (50m+). Pixel values ran...

Layer WMS GetCapabilities document