Code used in the paper "Ranking of Marine Protected Areas Threatened by the Sun Coral Invasion in Brazil" submitted to Biological Invasions Journal.
Authors: Millenne Ohanna S. M. S. Barreto, Thiago C. L. Silveira, Marcelo S. Crivellaro and Bárbara Segal
In Brazil, the sun coral Tubastraea spp. (Scleractinia; Dendrophylliidae), was introduced through bio-incrustation on oil platforms and/or drilling vessels in the late 1980s. Currently, these corals, known as sun coral, are found on oil platforms, drilling ships, monobuoys, rocky shores and reefs along more than 3000 km of the Brazilian coast. Considering the great potential impacts on Brazilian waters, management actions to control the species have been carried out in several regions, but it needs subsidies for more efficient efforts and resource targeting. In this sense, habitat suitability models play an important role in spatially predicting the potential for invasion and proliferation of non-native species in the environment. The goal of our study was thus to model the habitat suitability for Tubastraea spp. on the Brazilian coast seeking to support control and monitoring activities in marine protected areas. The models were adjusted to consider environmental and anthropogenic predictors. Our findings indicate that the predicted potential distribution of Tubastraea spp. covers a large area of suitable habitat available for invasion and the most important variable for the model was oil and gas extraction. In addition, the ecoregions that present the highest risk of sun coral invasion were the Amazon, followed by Northeast of Brazil, East of Brazil and Southeast of Brazil, while the marine protected areas with the highest risk of invasion by Tubastraea spp. were the Arapiranga-Tromaí Extractive Reserve, the Trindade and Martim Vaz Islands Natural Monument, and the Costa dos Corais Environmental Protection Area. Our study sheds light on the methods for prioritizing efforts and resources for the control, monitoring and prevention of the sun coral invasion on the Brazilian coast, which is particularly important in the context of today’s major discussion on the oil industry’s plans to operate at the Amazon River mouth.
Keywords: Tubastraea coccinea; Invasive species; Species Distribution Modeling; Habitat Suitability Models; Marine Protected Areas.