Description: Existing seagrass distribution datasets still suffer from known spatial gaps in knowledge, for instance, the north east Pacific, the coastal area of Scandinavia and the Northern African coast, are at best characterised by point occurrence records, whilst extensive meadows are known to occur. Point occurrence datasets cannot be used in area surface calculations as they do not indicate the spatial extent of seagrass beds. In the absence of in-situ mapping of seagrass extent at a global scale, existing occurrence data can be used in species distribution models to map the biome in unsurveyed areas, and indeed some regional attempts have been made. This polygon layer is a result of a MaxEnt model of the global distribution of seagrass using all available point records.Creation methodology:Species occurrence records were extracted from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), United Nations Environment Programme-World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) Ocean Data Viewer and Ocean biogeographic information system (OBIS). After data cleaning, 39045 occurrence records (combining all seagrass species) were used in species distribution model. 13 environmental variables from Global Marine Environment Datasets (GMED) were interpolated into 30 arc seconds resolution (1 km at the equator) and used in species distribution models. MaxEnt models were generated using 10 cross-validate replicate runs with parameters: convergence threshold = 10-5, regularization multiplier = 1, maximum number of background points = 10,000 and maximum iterations = 1000. The methodology is fully described in the paper Jayathilake and Costello (2018).
Service Item Id: 27ed2e39eabb4d538270ef2272602ff8
Copyright Text: Jayathilake D.R.M., Costello M.J. 2018. A modelled global distribution of the seagrass biome. Biological Conservation. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2018.07.009