Marine ecoregions and subecoregions within Indo-West Australian waters: A statistical approach based on species distributions

Aim: The Marine Ecoregions of the World (MEOW) system delineates the oceans into 232 ecoregions. Here, we aimed to evaluate the suitability of this system to represent species distributions within Indo-West Australian waters, explore alternative ecoregions and new subecoregions, and investigate environmental variables that are correlated with species distributions within those waters.

Location: Indo-West Australia

Taxa: Vertebrates, invertebrates, marine plants

Methods: We downloaded occurrence data for 14,513 marine species from the Ocean Biogeographic Information System. We analysed differences in species composition among nine ecoregions within Indo-West Australian waters using pairwise permutational multivariate analysis of variance to evaluate how well the MEOW system represents species distributions within those waters. We delineated subecoregions within each distinct ecoregion using hierarchical cluster analysis with the unweighted pair-group method using arithmetic aver...