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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Fabrice StephensonORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
© 2024 The Authors. Fisheries Management and Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. In the high seas, regional fishery management organisations are required to implement measures to prevent significant adverse impacts on vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs). Our objectives were to develop habitat suitability models for use in the spatial management of bottom fisheries in the South Pacific and to evaluate these and existing models using independent data from high-quality seafloor imagery. Presence-only models for seven VME indictor taxa were developed to complement previous modelling. Evaluation of habitat suitability models using withheld data indicated high mean True Skill Statistic scores of 0.44–0.64. Most habitat suitability models performed adequately when assessed with independent data on taxon presence and absence but were poor surrogates for abundance. We therefore advocate caution when using presence-only models for spatial management and call for more systematically collected data to develop abundance models.
Author(s): Bennion M, Anderson OF, Rowden AA, Bowden DA, Geange SW, Stephenson F
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Fisheries Management and Ecology
Year: 2024
Pages: ePub ahead of Print
Online publication date: 16/03/2024
Acceptance date: 04/03/2024
Date deposited: 02/04/2024
ISSN (print): 0969-997X
ISSN (electronic): 1365-2400
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Inc.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/fme.12700
DOI: 10.1111/fme.12700
Data Access Statement: The code used to develop the models here is available online (Stephenson et al., 2021) from GitHub: https://github.com/Fabri ce-Stephenson/VME_Predictions_South_Pacific. Much of the data used to produce the models in this paper are freely available online; see Geange et al. (2020) for details. Modelled spatial datasets will be provided upon request to the corresponding author.
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