The Antarctic seafloor contains unique and highly diverse species communities. While the conservation value of Antarctic seafloor communities is well recognised, many aspects of the distribution of this biodiversity are unknown, hindering informed management and conservation. Collaborating with scientists from all over the world we’ve created the Antarctic Seafloor Annotated Imagery Database (AS-AID) which contains 180 morphospecies classifications across 3,599 consistently annotated images from 19 research cruises.
In this talk we will present high-resolution (2km) maps of the distribution of Antarctic seafloor biodiversity, modelled by combining joint species distribution models with AS-AID and a suite of relevant environmental predictor variables. In total, we mapped the circum-Antarctic distribution for 83 of these morphospecies, revealing hotspots of richness, cover, biomass and predicted future change. These circum-Antarctic maps represent a significant step-change in the type of seafloor biodiversity information available to spatial planning, conservation and policy.