Vulnerable, but still poorly known, marine ecosystems: how to make distribution models more relevant and impactful for conservation and management of VMEs?

• Main Authors: Gros, C, Jansen, J, Dunstan, PK, Welsford, DC, Hill, NA
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Research Foundation 2022
• Subjects: Southern Ocean; vulnerable marine ecosystems; species distribution model; habitat suitability model; marine conservation; environmental impact assessment
• Online Access: https://eprints.utas.edu.au/46728/; https://eprints.utas.edu.au/46728/1/150810%20-%20Vulnerable%20but%20still%20poorly%20known%20marine%20ecosystems.pdf

Human activity puts our oceans under multiple stresses, whose impacts are alreadysignificantly affecting biodiversity and physicochemical properties. Consequently, there isan increased international focus on the conservation and sustainable use of oceans, includingthe protection of fragile benthic biodiversity hotspots in the deep sea, identified as vulnerablemarine ecosystems (VMEs). International VME risk assessment and conservation efforts arehampered because we largely do not know where VMEs are located. VME distributionmodelling has increasingly been recommended to extend our knowledge beyond sparseobservations. Nevertheless, the adoption of VME distribution models in spatial managementplanning and conservation remains limited. This work critically reviews VME distributionmodelling studies, and recommends promising avenues to make VME models more relevantand impactful for policy and management decision making. First, there is an importantinterplay between the type of VME data used to build models and how the generated mapscan be used in making management decisions, which is often ignored by model-builders.Overall, there is a need for more precise VME data for production of reliable models. Weprovide specific guidelines for seven common applications of VME distribution modelling toimprove the matching between the modelling and the user need. Second, the current criteriato identify VME often rely on subjective thresholds, which limits the transparency,transferability and effective applicability of distribution models in protection measures. Weencourage scientists towards founding their models on: (i) specific and quantitative definitionsof what constitute a VME, (ii) site conservation value assessment in relation to VME multitaxonspatial predictions, and (iii) explicitly mapping vulnerability. Along with the recentincrease in both deep-sea biological and environmental data quality and quantity, thesemodelling recommendations can lead towards more cohesive summaries of VME’s spatialdistributions and their ...