The application of physical surrogates to predict the distribution of marine benthic organisms

The identification of marine habitats based on physical parameters is increasingly important for
marine reserve design, allowing characterisation of habitat types over much wider areas than is
possible from often patchy biological data. Marine management zones often contain a wide array of
physical environments, which may not be captured in the biological sampling effort. The mismatch
between biological and physical information leads to uncertainty in the application of bio-physical
relationships at the broader management scale. In this study, a case study from northern Australia is
used to demonstrate a methodology for defining uncertainties which result from the extrapolation of
bio-physical associations across areas where detailed biological data is absent. In addition,
uncertainties relating to the interpolation of physical data sets and that resulting from the cluster
analysis applied to the physical data are calculated and mapped, providing marine managers with
greater robustness in their analysis of habitat distributions.