Sampling from commercial vessel routes can capture marine biodiversity distributions effectively

Collecting fine-scale occurrence data for marine species across large spatial scales is logistically challenging but is important to determine species distributions and for conservation planning. Inaccurate descriptions of species ranges could result in designating protected areas with inappropriate locations or boundaries. Optimising sampling strategies, therefore, is a priority for scaling up survey approaches using tools such as environmental DNA (eDNA) to capture species distributions. In a marine context, commercial vessels, such as ferries, could provide sampling platforms allowing access to under-sampled areas and repeatable sampling over time to track community changes. However, sample collection from commercial vessels could be biased and may not represent biological and environmental variability. Here, we evaluate whether sampling along Mediterranean ferry routes can yield unbiased biodiversity survey outcomes, based on perfect knowledge from a stacked species distribution mod..., This dataset includes binary species distribution models for 43 species of marine predators (9 mammals, 13 elasmobranchs, 20 fishes, and one turtle) from the Mediterranean Sea, and a binary stacked species distribution model showing the species richness of all marine predators. Models are available at 0.083° x 0.083° resolution in a WGS84 projection. Species distribution models were made with occurrence data collated from publically available data sources GBIF, OBIS, EurOBIS, and ACCOBAMS, and the Medlem database which is available upon request from its authors, as well as environmental predictors from Bio-Oracle and Marspec. Quality checking of occurrence records prior to modelling has been carried out including removal of records with GPS coordinates with fewer than three decimal places and duplicates between records based on the species, coordinates, year and month. Records were manually filtered further to identify records with the same species, year and month but different coordina..., .tiff files can be opened with GIS software or in R using the raster package.