Modelled occurrence probability for Posidonia oceanica meadows across the Mediterranean Sea

This dataset is an output of the ÔÇ£Mediterranean Sensitive HabitatsÔÇØ project (MEDISEH). It shows under a raster form modelled spatial distributions of Posidonia oceanica across the Mediterranean Sea. Posidonia oceanica is endemic to the Mediterranean Sea, where it is the dominant seagrass, covering about 50,000 km2 of coastal to offshore sandy and rocky areas down to depths of about 45 m. P. oceanica is a protected species according to EU legislation (Habitat directive), the Bern and Barcelona Conventions and several national legislations. While its distribution is well documented along the European shores of the western Mediterranean Sea, limited information is available about the southern shore and the eastern Mediterranean Sea. In order to bridge this information gap, one of the goals of Task 1.3 of the MEDISEH project was to model P. oceanica distribution across the whole Mediterranean basin.

A Random Forest (i.e. a Machine Learning technique) was ÔÇ£trainedÔÇØ on data from regions where information was available and then used to predict the probability of occurrence of P. oceanica where needed.

The raster has a spatial resolution of 0.004166 decimal degrees, and the values are in the [0,1] interval (occurrence probabilities).

Date (Publication): 2013-12-31T11:35:00

Presentation form: Digital map

Purpose: The work was financed through a service contract for the Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (DG-MARE, Specific Contract SI2.600741)

Status: Completed

Point of contact

Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
Michele Scardi	mscardi@mclink.it	Author
Marianna Giannoulaki	marianna@hcmr.gr	Principal investigator
EMODnet habitat	info@emodnet-seabedhabitats.eu	Distributor

Maintenance and update frequency: Not planned

Theme

Posidonia oceanica
Marine habitat mapping

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

Habitats and biotopes

Use limitation: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Access constraints: License

Use constraints: License

Spatial representation type: Grid

Denominator: 200000

Language: eng

Character set: UTF8

Topic category

Environment

Supplemental Information: Reference

Giannoulaki M, Belluscio A, Colloca F, Fraschetti S, Scardi M, Smith C, Panayotidis P, Valavanis V, Spedicato MT (Eds.) (2013). Mediterranean Sensitive Habitats (MEDISEH), final project report. DG MARE Specific Contract SI2.600741. Heraklion (Greece): Hellenic Centre for Marine Research. 557 p. URL: http://mareaproject.net/download/71/

Please refer to this final report of the MEDISEH project (section on Task 1.3) for full details on the methodology, results and interpretation of the maps showing the predicted occurrence probability for P. oceanica meadows (Figures 1.3.7-11).

The authors would also like to express their gratitude to those who kindly shared their occurrence data on Posidonia oceanica, and without whose inputs this work would not have been possible

Reference system identifier: WGS 1984

Distribution format

Name	Version

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link
OGC:WMS-1.1.1-http-get-map

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Conformance result

Date

Pass: No

Metadata

File identifier: c690ac1c-015b-43e2-8aa1-0aff72eec50e XML

Metadata language: eng

Character set: UTF8

Date stamp: 2022-04-28T16:37:31.168Z

Metadata standard name: ISO 19115:2003/19139

Metadata standard version: 1.0

Metadata author

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
	EMODnet habitat	info@emodnet-seabedhabitats.eu	Distributor

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