The increased anthropogenic pressure on the marine environment through over-use and overfishing, invasion of species and global climate change has led to an urgent need for more knowledge on the marine ecosystem. Marine species distribution modelling is an important element of marine ecosystem management. It is relied upon by marine spatial planning for i.e. predicting biological resources, the design of marine protected areas, the designation of essential fish habitats, the assessment of species invasion risk, pest control, human-animal conflict prevention, ….This study aims to improve and contribute to the process and understanding of marine species distribution modelling in order to facilitate an in depth study of the trends, vectors and distribution of introduced seaweeds in Europe. More specifically we wanted to 1) provide quality indicators for the marine species distribution data available in the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), 2) make global datasets for species distribution modelling in the past, current and future climate more accessible in R, 3) explore the relevance of different predictors of marine species distributions with MarineSPEED, a marine benchmark dataset of more than 500 species, 4) investigate the introduction history and trends in introduced seaweeds in Europe, 5) evaluate the risk of aquarium trade as a vector for future introductions of seaweeds and 6) study the ability of species distribution modelling to predict the introduction and spread of introduced seaweeds and propose a method for identifying candidate areas for further spreading under climate change. The first part of this thesis concerns general aspects of marine species distributions, the environmental data used for modelling and the relevance of marine predictors of species distributions.
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