Species distribution models for marine species occurring in European waters - OBIS/MPA Europe

The EU Horizon project Marine Protected Areas Europe (MPA Europe) generated priority maps identifying locations within the European seas where Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) would protect the greatest number of species, habitats, and ecosystems. The IOC's Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) developed Species Distribution Models (SDMs) for more than 12,000 species to serve as biodiversity inputs for the prioritization. The models were generated for both current and future periods (2050 and 2100) under five Shared Socio-economic Pathway (SSP) scenarios.

This record documents the resulting species range maps and accompanying data. It covers 12,039 species and 6 biogenic habitats (produced using Stacked SDMs). The source repository, including usage examples (notebooks in R and Python), is available at github.com/iobis/mpaeu_maps.

Access: All range maps and accompanying data are available through AWS S3 at https://obis-maps.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html. Content is also provided as a STAC catalogue, and maps can be explored dynamically through the maps platform. To download range maps, we recommend using the AWS CLI, e.g.: aws s3 sync --no-sign-request s3://obis-maps/sdm/species/taxonid=1005409/ ./taxonid=1005409/

License: The dataset as a whole is licensed under CC-BY-NC 4.0, respecting the license of the underlying occurrence data used to fit the models, which comes from OBIS and GBIF. A considerable number of species were fit with CC-BY (or CC0) data and may instead be used under that license; check the species-details.csv file in the repository for details.

Code availability: The full pipeline used to develop the SDMs is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 and can be found in the repository iobis/mpaeu_sdm. The core functions behind the modelling framework are in the repository iobis/mpaeu_msdm, which contains the package obissdm. More detailed documentation of the framework can be found here.

Important: Species distribution models (SDMs) are valuable tools, but it is important to understand how to interpret their results correctly. Before using the maps generated in this project, read the documentation available here. Results reflect the data available at the time of the project and the modelling decisions made. After this project is concluded, OBIS will continue to develop and improve its SDM framework, so newer versions of the maps may be available in the future.