Spatiotemporal Modeling of Nursery Habitat Using Bayesian Inference: Environmental Drivers of Juvenile Blue Crab Abundance

12/17/2021
by   A. Challen Hyman, et al.
0

Nursery grounds are favorable for growth and survival of juvenile fish and crustaceans through abundant food resources and refugia, and enhance secondary production of populations. While small-scale studies remain important tools to assess nursery value of habitats, targeted applications that unify survey data over large spatiotemporal scales are vital to generalize inference of nursery function, identify highly productive regions, and inform management strategies. Using 21 years of GIS and spatiotemporally indexed field survey data on potential nursery habitats, we constructed five Bayesian models with varying spatiotemporal dependence structures to infer nursery habitat value for juveniles of the blue crab C. sapidus within three tributaries in lower Chesapeake Bay. Out-of-sample predictions of juvenile counts from a fully nonseparable spatiotemporal model outperformed predictions from simpler models. Salt marsh surface area, turbidity, and their interaction showed the strongest associations (and positively) with abundance. Relative seagrass area, previously emphasized as the most valuable nursery in small spatial-scale studies, was not associated with abundance. Hence, we argue that salt marshes should be considered a key nursery habitat for blue crabs, even amidst extensive seagrass beds. Moreover, identification of nurseries should be based on investigations at broad spatiotemporal scales incorporating multiple potential nursery habitats, and on rigorously addressing spatiotemporal dependence.

READ FULL TEXT
research
09/13/2023

Spatiotemporal modelling of PM_2.5 concentrations in Lombardy (Italy) – A comparative study

This study presents a comparative analysis of three predictive models wi...
research
10/06/2020

Bayesian mitigation of spatial coarsening for a fairly flexible spatiotemporal Hawkes model

Self-exciting spatiotemporal Hawkes processes have found increasing use ...
research
12/24/2020

A Survey on Spatial and Spatiotemporal Prediction Methods

With the advancement of GPS and remote sensing technologies, large amoun...
research
03/29/2022

Spatiotemporal Patterns in Neurobiology: An Overview for Future Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in developing models...
research
08/08/2023

Exploring the Spatiotemporal Features of Online Food Recommendation Service

Online Food Recommendation Service (OFRS) has remarkable spatiotemporal ...
research
04/25/2020

Enabling Cost-Effective Population Health Monitoring By Exploiting Spatiotemporal Correlation: An Empirical Study

Because of its important role in health policy-shaping, population healt...
research
05/17/2021

Spatiotemporal wildfire modeling through point processes with moderate and extreme marks

Accurate spatiotemporal modeling of conditions leading to moderate and l...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset