Hull fouling marine invasive species pose a very low, but plausible, risk of introduction to East Antarctica in climate change scenarios

Aims: To identify potential hull fouling marine invasive species that could survive in East Antarctica presently and in the future.

Location: Australia's Antarctic continental stations: Davis, Mawson and Casey, East Antarctica; and subantarctic islands: Macquarie Island and Heard and McDonald Islands.

Methods: Our study uses a novel machine-learning algorithm to predict which currently known hull fouling MIS could survive in shallow benthic ecosystems adjacent to Australian Antarctic research stations and subantarctic islands, where ship traffic is present. We used gradient boosted machine learning (XGBoost) with four important environmental variables (sea surface temperature, salinity, nitrate and pH) to develop models of suitable environments for each potentially invasive species. We then used these models to determine if any Australia's three Antarctic research stations and two subantarctic islands could be environmentally suitable for MIS now and under two future climate scena...