Abiotic proxies for predictive mapping of near-shore benthic assemblages: implications for marine spatial planning

Marine spatial planning (MSP) should assist managers in guiding human activities towards sustainable practices and in minimizing user-conflicts in our oceans. A necessary first step is to quantify spatial patterns of marine assemblages in order to understand the ecosystem’s structure, function, and services. However, the large spatial scale, high economic value, and density of human activities in near-shore habitats often makes quantifying this component of marine ecosystems especially daunting. To address this challenge, we developed an assessment method that employs abiotic proxies to rapidly characterize marine assemblages in near-shore benthic environments with relatively high resolution. We evaluated this assessment method along 300 km of the State of Maine’s coastal shelf (< 100m depth)—a zone where high densities of buoyed lobster traps typically preclude extensive surveys by towed sampling gear (i.e., otter trawls). During the summer months of 2010-2013, we implemented a s...