Relationships between Cold-water Corals off Newfoundland and Labrador and their Environment

• Main Authors: Krista Jones, Rodolphe Devillers, Evan Edinger
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Newfoundland; Northwest Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.570.8420; http://www.mun.ca/geog/people/faculty/rdevillers/KJones_SKI2009.pdf

Cold-water corals inhabit deep-water environments in many parts of the world, but the factors governing their distribution remain unclear. Effective cold-water coral conservation strategies depend on knowledge of their distributions, their ecology, and the threats they face. The main objective of this study is to quantify relationships between corals occurrence/abundance and six environmental parameters to determine how these parameters may control the distribution of cold-water coral species in the Northwest Atlantic region. Data for six environmental parameters and two types of coral bycatch data were obtained. These datasets were processed to obtain regularly gridded data of each parameter which were subsequently sampled at each recorded coral location to build a sufficient database for analysis. The Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) technique, along with correlation analysis, was used. This research approach is beneficial, as other similar studies have not accounted for local or spatial variation in the relationships between coral species and environmental parameters as using GWR allows this study to do. The strongest associations between environmental parameters and coral were used to determine which variables to use in the GWR analysis. Other strong associations between