AquaMaps are computer-generated predictions of natural occurrence of marine species, based on the environmental tolerance of a given species with respect to depth, salinity, temperature, primary productivity, and its association with sea ice or coastal areas. These 'environmental envelopes' are matched against an authority file which contains respective information for the Oceans of the World. Independent knowledge such as distribution by FAO areas or bounding boxes are used to avoid mapping species in areas that contain suitable habitat, but are not occupied by the species.
CSV file containing species richness values and mapping parameters for marine species (with a probability of occurrence > 0.5) derived from AquaMaps. A total of 33,512 species were used in the generation of this file.
Coordinate system is WGS84 (ESPG 4326) with coordinates expressed in longitude and latitude.
Fields in this file are:
C-Square Code: unique identifier for grid
Longitude: longitude in decimal degrees
Latitude: latitude in decimal degrees
Species Count: number of species modeled at given point