A dynamic foraging habitat distribution estimate for green turtles in the Great Barrier Reef

A detailed understanding of how protected species use their habitats can guide management interventions in areas of high human use. For marine turtles, different food availability and physical habitat characteristics can underpin turtle presence at anthropogenically modified compared to unmodified sites. We develop telemetry-based habitat models with boosted regression trees to identify the environmental characteristics underpinning foraging habitat suitability for green turtles in the Great Barrier Reef region. We fit models to green turtle Fastloc GPS tracks from both modified and unmodified inshore foraging sites and using  pseudo-absences (simulated correlated random walks). We assess model performance by the ability to predict known foraging areas, true skill statistic, explanatory power (percent deviance explained) and predictive skill (AUC) of the models. We then predict potentially suitable foraging areas for green turtles in the Great Barrier Reef region using the model fo..., Code supporting this dataset is available at https://github.com/egwebster/SSM-SDM-public
Turtles were tracked during foraging at Port Curtis, Shoalwater Bay and post-nesting from Raine Island. Turtles were tracked with Fastloc-GPS (mean error 40m) and/or ARGOS tags (mean error ranging <1km to >10km) opportunistically between 2010 and 2021, resulting in a mixed sample of sex and maturity cohorts across the three study sites. The tracking dataset included 85 turtles at Port Curtis (mean±SD CCL= 84.78±21.66 cm), four at Shoalwater Bay (mean±SD CCL= 92.93±2.33 cm) and five who migrated to foraging grounds from Raine Island (mean±SD CCL= 102.89±2.72 cm, Appendix 2). The Port Curtis turtles comprised of 35 females, 36 males and 14 unidentified sex. Eighteen were juveniles, 24 were subadult turtles and the remainder were mature (49% of turtles in modified habitats were immature). At Shoalwater Bay  one was female andthree were males, only one of the four was a juvenile. The Raine Is..., , # A dynamic foraging habitat distribution estimate for green turtles in the Great Barrier Reef

The dataset contains simulated presences and pseudo-absences derived from Fastloc-GPS and ARGOS locations of green turtles (*Chelonia mydas*) tracked in inshore foraging habitats in eastern Queensland, Australia. It also contains the gridded environmental variables used to predict turtle distribution using telemetry-based habitat modelling. The environmental data files were derived from external, publically available sources. The full analysis workflow can be completed in R software using the code available on Github at [https://github.com/egwebster/SSM-SDM-public](https://github.com/egwebster/SSM-SDM-public).

## Data and file structures

### Primary data

The simulated turtle presences and pseudo-absences to be used as input for telemetry-based habitat modelling runs.

\"20240704ssm.Rds\" = R data file generated from prep&presences.Rmd, containing estimated locations of turtles at 12 hour int...,