Steph Brodie published a manuscript in Frontiers in Marine Science on how we can improve habitat models by including subsurface variables.
Species distribution models (SDMs) have become key tools for describing and predicting species habitats. In the marine domain, environmental data used in modeling species distributions are often remotely sensed, and as such have limited capacity for interpreting the vertical structure of the water column, or are sampled in situ, offering minimal spatial and temporal coverage. Advances in ocean models have improved our capacity to explore subsurface ocean features, yet there has been limited integration of such features in SDMs.
Spider plots from Brodie et al. 2018
Read more below:
S. Brodie, M.G. Jacox, S.J. Bograd, H. Welch, H. Dewar, K.L. Scales, S.M. Maxwell, D.K. Briscoe, C.A. Edwards, L.B. Crowder, R.L. Lewison, and E.L. Hazen. 2018. Integrating dynamic subsurface habitat metrics into species distribution models. Frontiers in Marine Science. DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2018.00219. PDF