Predicted deep-sea coral habitat suitability for the U.S. West Coast (NCEI Accession 0297219)

Predictive habitat models for deep-sea corals within the U.S. West Coast Exclusive Economic Zone were developed to aid future research and spatial mapping. Models were built at a 500 x 500 m spatial resolution with a range of physical, chemical, and environmental variables thought to influence the distribution of deep-sea corals. Models were generated using records, from a variety of sources, reliably identified at the order and suborder levels including Alcyoniina, Antipatharia, Calcaxonia, Holaxonia, and Scleraxonia under the MaxEnt framework with a spatial spatial partitioning cross-validation approach. Further, models were generated for all taxa records with thresholded predicted outputs at the 0.5 and 0.75 cutoff presence/absence value. For more details on the construction of the models, see Guinotte and Davies (2014). All models are present in GeoTIFF format.