Santa Maria di Leuca Province (Mediterranean Sea): Identification of Suitable Mounds for Cold-Water Coral Settlement Using Geomorphometric Proxies and Maxent Methods

Type Article
Date 2017
Language English
Author(s) Bargain Annaelle1, Marchese Fabrice2, Savini Alessandra2, Taviani Marco3, 4, 5, Fabri Marie-ClaireORCID1
Affiliation(s) 1 : IFREMER, Dept Oceanog & Dynam Ecosyst, La Seyne Sur Mer, France
2 : CoNISMa Local Research Unit, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy
3 : Istituto di Scienze Marine (ISMAR), CNR, Bologna, Italy
4 : Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, United States
5 : Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Naples, Italy
Source Frontiers In Marine Science (2296-7745) (Frontiers Media SA), 2017 , Vol. 4 , N. 338 , P. 1-17
DOI 10.3389/fmars.2017.00338
WOS© Times Cited 22
Keyword(s) predictive habitat mapping, maxent, cold-water coral, ecological proxies, Santa Maria di Leuca, Mediterranean Sea
Abstract

The Santa Maria di Leuca (SML) cold-water coral province (northern Ionian Sea) has the largest occurrence of a living white coral community currently known in the Mediterranean Sea. Madrepora oculata and Lophelia pertusa, identified as marking sensitive habitats of relevance by the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean, have been observed heterogeneously distributed on the summits of several mounds. This particularly patchy and uneven distribution in addition to their importance for regional biodiversity highlights the need to better understand their environmental preferences and predict their distribution. Bathymetric data (40 m resolution) was used to derive seafloor characteristics. A fine scale index quantifying the landscape elevation (Bathymetric Position Index at 120 m resolution) was used to select all the elevated features considered as candidate morphologies for potential coral mounds. Statistics on 22 known coral topped mounds were computed. Two statistical methods were then used to identify other potential coral mounds based on predictive variables. The first method, the Geomorphometric proxies method, consists in computing basic statistics of terrain variables, using them for a step-by-step classification in a quantitative approach to select a subset of candidate morphologies. The second method consists in using a predictive Habitat Suitability Model (Maxent model). The Geomorphometric proxies method identified 736 potential coral mounds while the Maxent method predicted 1,252 potential coral mounds. A subset of 517 potential coral mounds was common to both methods. The analysis of the contribution of each variable with the Maxent method showed that the variable “Vector Ruggedness Measure” at a resolution of 5 pixels (200 m) contributed to 53% of the final Maxent model, followed by the “Terrain Texture” index (31%) at a resolution of 11 pixels (440 m). The common potential coral mounds are mainly located in an area characterized by a mass transport deposit, also called the mounds area because of the roughness of the seafloor, in accordance with the high proportional contribution of the noticeable first roughness index to the Maxent model. The results highlight the importance of the global conservation of the entire Province, with white coral probably widespread over the entire 600 km2 SML area.

Full Text
File Pages Size Access
Publisher's official version 17 7 MB Open access
Table 1 1 177 KB Open access
Image 1 1 307 KB Open access
Image 2 1 257 KB Open access
Image 3 1 171 KB Open access
Image 4 1 109 KB Open access
Top of the page

How to cite 

Bargain Annaelle, Marchese Fabrice, Savini Alessandra, Taviani Marco, Fabri Marie-Claire (2017). Santa Maria di Leuca Province (Mediterranean Sea): Identification of Suitable Mounds for Cold-Water Coral Settlement Using Geomorphometric Proxies and Maxent Methods. Frontiers In Marine Science, 4(338), 1-17. Publisher's official version : https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2017.00338 , Open Access version : https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00407/51826/