The Marine Ecoregions of the World (MEOW) system delineates the oceans into 232 ecoregions. Here, we aimed to evaluate the suitability of this system to represent species distributions within Indo-West Australian waters, explore alternative ecoregions and new subecoregions and investigate environmental variables that are correlated with species distributions within those waters.
Indo-West Australia.
Vertebrates, invertebrates, marine plants.
We downloaded occurrence data for 14,513 marine species from the Ocean Biogeographic Information System. We analysed differences in species composition among nine ecoregions within Indo-West Australian waters using pairwise permutational multivariate analysis of variance to evaluate how well the MEOW system represents species distributions within those waters. We delineated subecoregions within each distinct ecoregion using hierarchical cluster analysis with the unweighted pair-group method using arithmetic averages. We analysed relationships between environmental variables and species composition using distance-based linear models.
Species composition was significantly different among ecoregions, except for three adjacent regions, which were combined into a single large ecoregion. Hence, seven distinct ecoregions were further analysed. Our study identified 13 subecoregions within these ecoregions that each separate into ‘inshore’ and ‘offshore’ zones. Depth explained the most variation in species composition of the combined taxa and sea surface temperature was the most important parameter in explaining the variability in most taxa.
The MEOW system did not represent well the distribution of marine species within Indo-West Australian waters. Alternatively, we show that those waters encompass seven distinct ecoregions with 13 subecoregions. The main environmental drivers of species distributions could be depth and sea surface temperature. The proposed ecoregions and subecoregions allow us to improve the biogeographic hypotheses for understanding the evolution of marine species and identify representative marine habitats and species composition for the setting of Marine Protected Area networks within Indo-West Australian waters.