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      Global Habitat Suitability for Framework-Forming Cold-Water Corals

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      PLoS ONE
      Public Library of Science

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          Abstract

          Predictive habitat models are increasingly being used by conservationists, researchers and governmental bodies to identify vulnerable ecosystems and species' distributions in areas that have not been sampled. However, in the deep sea, several limitations have restricted the widespread utilisation of this approach. These range from issues with the accuracy of species presences, the lack of reliable absence data and the limited spatial resolution of environmental factors known or thought to control deep-sea species' distributions. To address these problems, global habitat suitability models have been generated for five species of framework-forming scleractinian corals by taking the best available data and using a novel approach to generate high resolution maps of seafloor conditions. High-resolution global bathymetry was used to resample gridded data from sources such as World Ocean Atlas to produce continuous 30-arc second (∼1 km 2) global grids for environmental, chemical and physical data of the world's oceans. The increased area and resolution of the environmental variables resulted in a greater number of coral presence records being incorporated into habitat models and higher accuracy of model predictions. The most important factors in determining cold-water coral habitat suitability were depth, temperature, aragonite saturation state and salinity. Model outputs indicated the majority of suitable coral habitat is likely to occur on the continental shelves and slopes of the Atlantic, South Pacific and Indian Oceans. The North Pacific has very little suitable scleractinian coral habitat. Numerous small scale features (i.e., seamounts), which have not been sampled or identified as having a high probability of supporting cold-water coral habitat were identified in all ocean basins. Field validation of newly identified areas is needed to determine the accuracy of model results, assess the utility of modelling efforts to identify vulnerable marine ecosystems for inclusion in future marine protected areas and reduce coral bycatch by commercial fisheries.

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          Most cited references79

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          New developments in museum-based informatics and applications in biodiversity analysis.

          Information from natural history collections (NHCs) about the diversity, taxonomy and historical distributions of species worldwide is becoming increasingly available over the Internet. In light of this relatively new and rapidly increasing resource, we critically review its utility and limitations for addressing a diverse array of applications. When integrated with spatial environmental data, NHC data can be used to study a broad range of topics, from aspects of ecological and evolutionary theory, to applications in conservation, agriculture and human health. There are challenges inherent to using NHC data, such as taxonomic inaccuracies and biases in the spatial coverage of data, which require consideration. Promising research frontiers include the integration of NHC data with information from comparative genomics and phylogenetics, and stronger connections between the environmental analysis of NHC data and experimental and field-based tests of hypotheses.
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            Seasonal rhythms of net primary production and particulate organic carbon flux to depth describe the efficiency of biological pump in the global ocean

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              ‘Patch’ development of the deep-water coral Lophelia Pertusa (L.) on Rockall Bank

              J Wilson (1979)
              Submersible observations have been made on‘ patches’ of the deep-water coral Lophelia pertusa (L.) occurring on Rockall Bank, north-east Atlantic. It is suggested that an initial colony gives rise to a ring of younger colonies. These in turn give rise to further rings of colonies, thus enlarging the ‘patch’. The transition from stage to stage depends on portions of living colonies, weakened by clionid sponge attacks, breaking off and falling away from the colony so providing the substrate for the development of later colonies, thus enabling lateral increase in the size of the ‘patch’ to take place.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2011
                15 April 2011
                : 6
                : 4
                : e18483
                Affiliations
                [1 ]School of Ocean Sciences, Bangor University, Menai Bridge, Anglesey, United Kingdom
                [2 ]Marine Conservation Biology Institute, Bellevue, Washington, United States of America
                University of Glamorgan, United Kingdom
                Author notes

                Conceived and designed the experiments: AJD JMG. Performed the experiments: AJD. Analyzed the data: AJD. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: AJD JMG. Wrote the paper: AJD JMG.

                Article
                PONE-D-10-03469
                10.1371/journal.pone.0018483
                3078123
                21525990
                85a17908-1ab4-4a5b-a9f2-370dd4c3d8c9
                Davies, Guinotte. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
                History
                : 6 October 2010
                : 9 March 2011
                Page count
                Pages: 15
                Categories
                Research Article
                Biology
                Computational Biology
                Ecosystem Modeling
                Ecology
                Ecological Environments
                Marine Environments
                Marine Biology
                Marine Conservation
                Marine Ecology
                Marine Monitoring

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                Uncategorized

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