Ecological Niche Modeling of Three Species of Stenella Dolphins in the Caribbean Basin, With Application to the Seaflower Biosphere Reserve

Frontiers in Marine Science

Julie Mellinger¹  Laurent Bouveret¹  Delma Nataly Castelblanco-Martínez³  Jolanda A. Luksenburg⁵  Roosevelt Mesa-Gutiérrez⁶  Benjamin de Montgolfier⁷  Eric A. Ramos⁸  Vincent Ridoux⁹  Daniel M. Palacios^1,10  Ignacio Benites Moreno^1,12  Nohelia Farías-Curtidor^1,13  Natalia Botero-Acosta^1,13  Paula Alejandra Chávez-Carreño^1,14  Jaime Bolaños-Jiménez^1,15  Dalia C. Barragán-Barrera^1,16  Karina Bohrer do Amaral^1,17  Rocío Lancheros-Neva^1,18  Paula Bueno^1,19 

[1] 0Observatoire des Mammifères Marins de l’Archipel Guadeloupéen, Archipelago’s Guadeloupe, France;1Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, University of Quintana Roo, Chetumal, Mexico;2Fundación Internacional para la Naturaleza y la Sostenibilidad, Chetumal, Mexico;3Institute of Environmental Sciences, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands;4Department of Environmental Science and Policy, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, United States;5Duke Marine Laboratory, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States;6Aquasearch, Sainte-Luce, France;7The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, United States;8Observatoire PELAGIS, Université de La Rochelle, La Rochelle, France;9Marine Mammal Institute and Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Oregon State University, Newport, OR, United States;Asociación Civil Sea Vida, Aragua, Venezuela;Centro de Estudos Costeiros, Limnológicos e Marinhos, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Imbé, Brazil;Fundación Macuáticos Colombia, Medellín, Colombia;Independent Researcher, La Paz, Mexico;Instituto de Ciencias Marinas y Pesquerías, Universidad Veracruzana, Veracruz, Mexico;Laboratorio de Ecología Molecular de Vertebrados Acuáticos, Department of Biological Sciences, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia;Laboratório de Sistemática e Ecologia de Aves e Mamíferos Marinhos, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil;Parques Nacionales Naturales de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia;WWF Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia;

关键词: Stenella;    potential distribution area;    Caribbean Basin;    Seaflower Biosphere Reserve;    Maxent;    ecological niche modeling;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fmars.2019.00010

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Dolphins of the genus Stenella occur in pelagic waters of both tropical and warm-temperate oceans. Three species, the Atlantic spotted dolphin (Stenella frontalis), the pantropical spotted dolphin (S. attenuata), and the spinner dolphin (S. longirostris) are abundant worldwide, but in the Caribbean Basin they have been poorly studied and information on their distribution patterns is scarce. Specifically, in Colombia’s remote Seaflower Biosphere Reserve (SFBR) S. attenuata has been reported occasionally, but S. frontalis and S. longirostris have never been recorded before. To address this information gap, an ecological niche modeling approach was used to determine the potential distribution patterns of these three dolphin species in the region. Records of these species for the Caribbean Basin were compiled, including both published and unpublished data. Environmental information, including bathymetry, bathymetric slope, distance to shore, sea surface temperature, sea surface salinity, and chlorophyll-a concentration was gathered from public databases (MARSPEC and Bio-ORACLE) in raster format. The maximum entropy algorithm (Maxent) for modeling species’ geographic distributions with presence-only data was used. After filtering the data, 210 records of S. attenuata, 204 of S. frontalis, and 80 of S. longirostris were used to run models. The best configuration for each model was chosen based on the ΔAICc criterion. For all three species, the final ecological niche models returned AUC test values higher than 0.8, indicating satisfactory model performance. The resulting potential distribution maps suggested that areas closest to continental shorelines of the Caribbean Basin and surrounding islands had the highest environmental suitability for all species (>70%). All models reported high environmental suitability for S. attenuata and S. longirostris in the SFBR, mainly in the southernmost part surrounding San Andrés and Providence Archipelago. Assessment of niche overlap from the predictions of species distributions using the similarity statistic and pairwise map overlap indicated that S. frontalis and S. longirostris had niches slightly more similar in comparison to S. attenuata. As this was a first effort to fill a gap in our understanding of the distribution of species in the genus Stenella in the Caribbean Basin, further studies are necessary using both niche modeling and biological/ecological approaches.

【 授权许可】

Unknown