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Multi-scale Fish-habitat Associations and the Use of Habitat Surrogates to Predict the Organisation and Abundance of Deep-water Fish Assemblages

Created 17/10/2025

Updated 17/10/2025

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Deep-water demersal fishes are an important component of continental shelf and slope ecosystems and play an important role in the economies of many countries. Strong and predictable relationships of fishes with seabed habitats, in conjunction with rapid advances in acoustic seabed mapping capabilities, indicate there is great potential for using habitats as proxies or ‘surrogates’ to predict species distribution and abundance patterns at broad regional scales. However, few studies have evaluated this potential in complex seabed environments. In this study, we examined the spatial distributions, assemblage composition, and benthic habitat associations of deep-water demersal fish species over three spatial scales across Cordell Bank, a deep-water bank in central California. Demersal fishes were counted and habitats quantified from 60 strip-transects allocated over the extent of the bank using in situ observer and video-recorded data from the two-person Delta submersible. Both abundance and distribution of demersal fish species on Cordell Bank were strongly correlated with spatial location and habitat composition on the bank. Habitat structure was heterogeneous at several spatial scales. At broad scales, the rocky bank itself contained the highest diversity of both habitats and fishes. At intermediate scales, transition zones (10-100s of m wide) between the bank and continental slope and shelf sediments supported a diverse and characteristic suite of fish species. Habitats were also heterogeneous at finer-scales (1-10s of m) within these broad-scale zones, and fish responses to these habitat characteristics were taxon-specific, and often contingent on the spatial configuration of fine scale habitats within the broader-scale landscape. The results of this study indicate that for many species it is not sufficient to just know the fine-scale habitat association to predict fish assemblages.

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Field Value
Title Multi-scale Fish-habitat Associations and the Use of Habitat Surrogates to Predict the Organisation and Abundance of Deep-water Fish Assemblages
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/192f8cb1-5c2d-4ebd-97f6-a1a7b4f91934
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 22/04/2018
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
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}
Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "Multi-scale Fish-habitat Associations and the Use of Habitat Surrogates to Predict the Organisation and Abundance of Deep-water Fish Assemblages". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/multi-scale-fish-habitat-associations-and-the-use-of-habitat-surrogates-to-predict-the-organisa