Spatial ecology and ontogeny: incorporating fish size-classes into species distribution models

Abstract

I use spatial modelling to investigate how relative abundance and body-length can be used to identify niche requirements and habitat partitioning between conspecific fishes. The models identified specific areas associated with juveniles and adults of same or multiple fish species. I investigate the performance of models using data collected from towed and baited video systems. The towed video models detected fine-scale environmental niche associations of fish, which could be missed by commonly used baited systems.