High-resolution sea duck distribution modeling: Relating aerial and ship survey data to food resources, anthropogenic pressures, and topographic variables

ABSTRACT Anthropogenic developments in marine coastal zones potentially overlap with areas of conservation interest, including important areas for birds. Ideally, spatial patterns of species abundance should be considered at ecologically relevant spatial resolutions (high resolutions) to inform spatial planning and environmental assessments. Most planning so far, however, has relied on coarse-resolution distribution maps from atlas projects or models often based on limited datasets (few surveys), and relationships with environmental variables have rarely been taken into account, leaving many studies and recommendations vulnerable to criticism. We therefore combined the strengths of a detailed database of spatially explicit aerial and ship surveys with high-resolution environmental predictors and species distribution models to predict detailed density patterns for 3 sea duck species, as part of an environmental impact assessment (EIA) in the southern Baltic Sea. We also compared the results from 2 differen...