Hull fouling marine invasive species pose a very low, but plausible, risk of introduction to East Antarctica in climate change scenarios ...

• Main Authors: Holland, Oakes, Shaw, Justine, Stark, Jonathan, Wilson, Kerrie
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2021
• Subjects: Antarctic; East Antarctica; Heard; McDonald Islands; Antarc*; Antarctica; Macquarie Island
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3ffbg79hf; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.3ffbg79hf

Aims: To identify potential hull fouling marine invasive species that could survive in East Antarctica presently and in the future. Location: Australia's Antarctic continental stations: Davis, Mawson and Casey, East Antarctica; and subantarctic islands: Macquarie Island and Heard and McDonald Islands. Methods: Our study uses a novel machine-learning algorithm to predict which currently known hull fouling MIS could survive in shallow benthic ecosystems adjacent to Australian Antarctic research stations and subantarctic islands, where ship traffic is present. We used gradient boosted machine learning (XGBoost) with four important environmental variables (sea surface temperature, salinity, nitrate and pH) to develop models of suitable environments for each potentially invasive species. We then used these models to determine if any Australia's three Antarctic research stations and two subantarctic islands could be environmentally suitable for MIS now and under two future climate scenarios. Results: Most of the ... : A full description of the methods can be found in the manuscript. A short summary is provided here: 1. As we were interested in hull fouling species, the global port network was used to build the model of environmental suitability for each species. Port occurring in fresh water environments, for example, the North American Great Lakes, or ports that had insufficient data were excluded from the dataset. 2. The Global Invasive Species Database (iucngisd.org) was used to identify marine invasive species with an association to hull fouling. If there was insufficient data on the GISD record, primary literature was used to ascertain any hull fouling association. Whilst many of the species identified have a stronger association with ballast water as a means of transport, all species identified in this study do have an association with hull fouling also. This yielded a list of 160 species, though most belonged to the Didemnum spp. group and were not adequately resolved to species level. As most Didemnum species have ...