DOI: 10.5061/dryad.41ns1rnht
title: Climate change effects on deep-water corals – habitat suitability model input data

description: Deep-water corals are protected in the seas around New Zealand by
 legislation that prohibits intentional damage and removal, and by marine
 protected areas where bottom trawling is prohibited. However, these
 measures do not protect them from the impacts of a changing climate and
 ocean acidification. To enable adequate future protection from these
 threats we require knowledge of the present distribution of corals and the
 environmental conditions that determine their preferred habitat, as well
 as the likely future changes in these conditions, so that we can identify
 areas for potential refugia. In this study, we built habitat suitability
 models for 12 taxa of deep-water corals using a comprehensive set of
 sample data and predicted present and future seafloor environmental
 conditions from an earth system model specifically tailored for the South
 Pacific. These models predicted that for most taxa there will be
 substantial shifts in the location of the most suitable habitat and
 decreases in the area of such habitat by the end of the 21st century,
 driven primarily by decreases in seafloor oxygen concentrations, shoaling
 of aragonite and calcite saturation horizons, and increases in nitrogen
 concentrations. The current network of protected areas in the region
 appear to provide little protection for most coral taxa, as there is
 little overlap with areas of highest habitat suitability, either in the
 present or the future. We recommend an urgent re-examination of the
 spatial distribution of protected areas for deep-water corals in the
 region, utilising spatial planning software that can balance protection
 requirements against value from fishing and mineral resources, take into
 account the current status of the coral habitats after decades of bottom
 trawling, and consider connectivity pathways for colonisation of corals
 into potential refugia.
description: Data include twelve .csv files with locations of presence and
 absence samples for twelve deep-water coral taxa, collected from research
 surveys, commercial fishing operations, and museum records. Along with
 locality information, values for a range of parameters representing
 seafloor environmental conditions at the sampling sites are
 included. in addition to the sampling data there are
 three other .csv files representing values of the environmental parameters
 in each cell of a 1x1 km grid covering the study area (the New Zealand
 Marine Region), with cell locations represented as projected coordinates
 in Mercator 41 Projection (EPSG: 3994). The environmental parameters are a
 mixture of temporally fixed and temporally variable parameters, the latter
 obtained from New Zealand Earth System Model outputs. One file has
 parameters that represent present conditions (reference period 1995-2014),
 the second file has parameters that represent future conditions (reference
 period 2080-2099) under a 'moderate' greenhouse gas increase
 trajectory (SSP2-4.5), and the third file has parameters that represent
 future conditions under a 'strong' greenhouse gas increase
 trajectory (SSP3-7.0).
description: The .csv files can be readily accessed with a wide range of
 open-source and proprietry software