Using species distribution models to describe essential fish habitat in Alaska

• Main Authors: Laman, Edward Anthony, Rooper, Christopher N, Turner, Kali, Rooney, Sean, Cooper, Daniel W., Zimmermann, Mark
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: NRC Research Press (a division of Canadian Science Publishing) 2017
• Subjects: Bering Sea; Gulf of Alaska; Kamchatka; Alaska; Aleutian Islands
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/82829; http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/cjfas-2017-0181

Describing essential habitat is an important step toward understanding and conserving harvested species in ecosystem based fishery management. Using data from fishery-independent ichthyoplankton, groundfish surveys, and commercial fisheries observer data, we utilized species distribution modeling techniques to predict habitat-based spatial distributions of federally managed species in Alaska. The distribution and abundance maps were used to refine existing essential fish habitat descriptions for the region. In particular, we used maximum entropy and generalized additive modeling to delineate distribution and abundance of early (egg, larval, and pelagic juvenile) and later (settled juvenile and adult) life history stages of groundfishes and crabs across multiple seasons in three large marine ecosystems (Gulf of Alaska, eastern Bering Sea, and Aleutian Islands) and the northern Bering Sea. We present a case study, featuring Kamchatka flounder (Atheresthes evermanni), from the eastern and northern Bering Sea to represent the > 400 habitat-based distribution maps generated for more than 80 unique species-region-season-life-stage combinations. The results of these studies will be used to redescribe essential habitat of federally managed fishes in crabs in Alaska. The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author.