The use of habitat suitability modelling for seagrass: A review

Coastal ecosystems, including coral reefs, mangroves, and seagrass, are in global decline. Mitigation approaches include restoration other managed recovery interventions. To maximise success, these should be guided by an understanding of the environmental niche geographic limits foundational species. However, choices data, variables, modelling can bewildering when embarking on such exercise, biases associated with often unknown. We reviewed current available knowledge methodological variables used to model map habitat suitability for coastal ecosystems. While our focus is we draw information from all marine macrophyte studies greater coverage at different scales around world. collated 75 publications, which 35 included seagrasses. Out found most commonly predictor were temperature (64%), bathymetry (61%), light availability (49%), salinity respectively. The same also seagrass Habitat Suitability Models (HSM) but following order: (74%), (57%), (51%), (51%). popular method HSMs was ensemble models (29%) followed MaxEnt (17%). Cross-validation selection procedure (24%), threshold probability favoured validation (33%). Most (87%) did not calculate or report uncertainty measures. approach create HSM vary location scale study. Based upon previous studies, it suggested that best would use models, along a (Cross-validation) validate measures process.