Fig 1.
Location of the Falkland Islands study area.
The three focal study sites between 2017 and 2019 comprise: (1) north-east coast of the Falklands (NEF); (2) the west coast of West Falkland (WF); and (3) the Falkland Sound (FS). Survey effort (all weather conditions) is shown in red. Falklands bathymetric and coastline shapefiles were accessed open source from the Information Management System (IMS) and GIS Data Centre in Stanley, Falkland Islands (available via https://www.south-atlantic-research.org/research/data-science).
Table 1.
Candidate predictor variables (PVs).
Table 2.
Total search effort (km) in each year in favourable conditions (Beaufort sea state ≤4, swell height ≤2 m, visibility >5 km), and the number of associated Sightings (S) and Individual (I) recorded of each cetacean species.
Table 3.
Performance of Generalized Additive Models (GAM) and MaxEnt models as assessed through cross-validation.
Table 4.
Summary of the 7 km resolution generalized additive model results (including effective degrees of freedom, edf) for coastal cetacean species.
Table 5.
Summary of MaxEnt results for coastal cetacean species.
Fig 2.
Predicted relative density of cetacean species around the Falkland Islands based on a generalized additive model at 7 km resolution.
(A) sei whale. (B) Combined sei whale and large baleen whale. (C) Southern right whale. (D) Peale’s dolphin. (E) Commerson’s dolphin. The Falklands coastline shapefile was accessed open source from the Information Management System (IMS) and GIS Data Centre in Stanley, Falkland Islands (available via https://www.south-atlantic-research.org/research/data-science).
Fig 3.
Predicted relative density of cetacean species around the Falkland Islands based on MaxEnt at 4 km resolution.
(A) sei whale. (B) Combined sei whale and large baleen whale. (C) Southern right whale. (D) Peale’s dolphin. (E) Commerson’s dolphin. The Falklands coastline shapefile was accessed open source from the Information Management System (IMS) and GIS Data Centre in Stanley, Falkland Islands (available via https://www.south-atlantic-research.org/research/data-science).