Authors / CoAuthors
Bridge, T. | Huang, Z. | Przeslawski, R. | Kool, J. | Nichol, S.L.
Abstract
Conservation planning requires spatial information on biodiversity within a region of interest and its patterns of association with physical environmental features. Such information, however, is often unavailable, and spatial planning is reliant upon proxies based on assumed relationships between species and environmental features have been used as the basis of spatial planning. Here we evaluate the effectiveness of a set of key ecological features (KEF) used in the design of Australia's network of Commonwealth Marine Reserves for representing key marine macrobenthos in a large and biodiverse but data-sparse region in the Oceanic Shoals Commonwealth Marine Reserve (CMR), Timor Sea. Predictive spatial models of the distributions of four key habitat-forming macrobenthic taxa including hard corals, soft corals, gorgonians and sponges, were built using 10 geophysical variables and Boosted Regression Trees. We identified the extent to which KEFs captured the distributions of each taxon, and whether models derived from the western region of the CMR could predict well the distribution of the same taxon in the eastern CMR. All four taxa showed similar habitat preferences, occurring on the tops of raised geomorphic features with hard substrata and while absent from deeper habitats with soft substrata. However, high variability in the biodiversity observed among similar features indicated that factors other than geomorphology alone influence spatial patterns in the distribution of macrobenthos in the region. Overall, models derived from the western region performed reasonably well predicting distribution patterns in eastern region. Transferability of models among sites increased with greater model precision accuracy (higher deviance explained), and all models predicted taxon absence better than presence.
Product Type
nonGeographicDataset
eCat Id
83903
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Cnr Jerrabomberra Ave and Hindmarsh Dr GPO Box 378
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Keywords
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- External Publication
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- Marine
- ( Theme )
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- marine biodiversity
- ( Theme )
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- marine park
- Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)
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- Earth Sciences
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- Published_Internal
Publication Date
2015-01-01T00:00:00
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