Pitcher CR (2010). Biophysical modelling and prediction of spatial patterns in biodiversity: Performance of Predictive Biophysical Methods. Progress report. Report to the Commonwealth Environment Research Facilities (CERF) program, administered through the Australian Government’s Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities.
Overview
Australia is in the midst of a highly active period of marine planning that will result in a national network of marine reserves (National Representative System of Marine Protected Areas), and bioregional plans for all the contiguous EEZ. Spatial planning is based on the spatial distribution of assets, uses and threats. A key marine asset for Australia is its biodiversity – megadiverse in the north and highly endemic in the south. Prior to the Marine Biodiversity Hub’s formation no national maps of biodiversity existed at fine enough scales to assist with the siting of marine reserves, although earlier analyses through IMCRA 4.0 had identified the provinces and depths that needed to be considered to build a comprehensive network. A major goal of the Hub was to develop approaches to predict fine-scale patterns in marine biodiversity around Australia. It was not planned that these would be ready in time to support regional marine planning but would be used later to improve implementation and monitoring of those plans. Progress was rapid despite the technical challenge of assembling large databases of diverse physical and biological data and the need to develop new approaches to analyzing these data. Unexpectedly we found ourselves in the position of being able to provide new national maps of biodiversity to DEWHA, States and conservation NGOs to support their input to regional marine planning. Maps have been provided for the South West, North West, and North regions and will soon be provided for the East region. We will be working with Atlas of Living Australia to complete maps for the South East and hence a complete national coverage in the latter half of 2010. We have worked with regional planning teams and ERIN in DEWHA to speed the adoption of these first Australian biodiversity maps in regional marine planning. Examples of these maps and supporting material are provided in an
appendix to this report.
This report summarizes the development and application of the models developed to predict patterns in marine biodiversity from physical covariates, and their performance in fitting to the available data. Further work in the Marine Biodiversity Hub will focus on extending these models to the diverse areas that the partners hold data for. This will provide the means to compare these predictive methods over a wide range of environments and survey types. This work will appear in published papers and the Hub’s final report.
