Coastal seagrass habitat suitability model (wet and dry season) in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (MTSRF, JCU)

This dataset is consists of modelled habitat suitability of coastal seagrass distribution in the wet and dry seasons along the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area coastline. A Bayesian belief network was used to quantify the relationship (dependencies) between seagrass and eight environmental drivers: relative wave exposure, bathymetry, spatial extent of flood plumes, season, substrate, region, tidal range and sea surface temperature. We found that at the scale of the entire GBRWHA, the main drivers of inshore seagrass presence are tidal range and relative exposure. The outputs of our analysis included a probabilistic GIS-surface of inshore seagrass presence and distribution for both the wet and dry seasons, and across four regions at the scale of 2km*2km planning units. The model can be used by managers in the GBRWHA to delineate seagrass ecological units, and assist them in marine planning at broad spatial scales. For more information about methods see: Grech, A. and Coles, R.J. 2010, An ecosystem-scale predictive model of coastal seagrass distribution, Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems 20: 437-444 Data Location: This dataset is filed in the eAtlas enduring data repository at: data\MTSRF\QLD_MTSRF-1-1-3_JCU_Grech-A_Seagrass-coastal-model-2007