Oyster Habitat Suitability in the Northern Gulf of Mexico

Abstract

ABSTRACT Oysters provide a wide variety of ecosystem services including furnishing habitat, supporting an economic industry, and enhancing water quality. To identify suitable areas for oyster restoration and aquaculture, areas of oystersuitable habitat must first be identified. A habitat suitability model is an ideal tool for identifying sites for species restoration. Because it relies on presence-only data, MaxEnt is a particularly useful habitat-suitabilitymodel for identifying restoration and species introduction sites. Habitat suitability models rely on the selection of environmental factors, which are assumed to be important for the target species; however, this selection of environmental factors is often arbitrary and there are few existing guidelines. This work applies an oyster habitat suitability model to the St. Louis Bay in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Six environmental factors, namely average salinity, maximum temperature, minimum temperature, water depth, minimum dissolved oxygen, and average...