Most fish and shrimps have valuable ecological and commercial benefits. The difficulties of the collection of distribution records and volatile nature these marine organisms have limited their monitoring and conserving. MaxEnt modeling technique is ideal option for modeling distribution and habitat preference of different marine organisms. In this study, the present distribution of commercial fish and shrimps including orange-spotted grouper John’s snapper, tigertooth croaker, banana and Jinga shrimps was predicted using MaxEnt and a set of environmental layers. Distribution modeling findings showed that this technique reflects well the actual distribution of species. Environmental predictors including iron, calcite, temperature, primary productivity and depth were the most important environmental factors determining the distribution of species. Finding of habitat preferences indicated that the recent habitats of the species have suitable environmental conditions for the species. The Persian Gulf, the Sea of Oman, the North Arabian Sea and Australia coasts of the South Pacific were predicted as the most suitable habitats for species. The finding of this study provided basic data to identify distribution areas and habitat preferences of commercial fish and shrimps for their recent management plans and conservation development. |
