Assessing Habitat Use by Snapper (Chrysophrys auratus) from Baited Underwater Video Data in a Coastal Marine Park

RESEARCH ARTICLE Assessing Habitat Use by Snapper (Chrysophrys auratus) from Baited Underwater Video Data in a Coastal Marine Park Maria A. Terres1*, Emma Lawrence2, Geoffrey R. Hosack3, Michael D. E. Haywood4, Russell C. Babcock4 a11111 1 Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America, 2 Digital Productivity Flagship, CSIRO, Dutton Park, Queensland, Australia, 3 Digital Productivity Flagship, CSIRO, Castray Esplanade, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, 4 Oceans and Atmosphere Flagship, CSIRO, Dutton Park, Queensland, Australia * OPEN ACCESS Citation: Terres MA, Lawrence E, Hosack GR, Haywood MDE, Babcock RC (2015) Assessing Habitat Use by Snapper (Chrysophrys auratus) from Baited Underwater Video Data in a Coastal Marine Park. PLoS ONE 10(8): e0136799. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0136799 Editor: Christopher J Fulton, The Australian National University, AUSTRALIA Received: June 18, 2015 Accepted: August 7, 2015 Published: August 28, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Terres et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This work was undertaken for the Marine Biodiversity Hub, a collaborative partnership supported through funding from the Australian Government0 s National Environmental Research Program (NERP). NERP Marine Biodiversity Hub partners include the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania; CSIRO, Geoscience Australia, Australian Institute of Marine Science, Museum Victoria, Charles Darwin University and the University of Western Australia. The funders had no Abstract Baited Underwater Video (BUV) systems have become increasingly popular for assessing marine biodiversity. These systems provide video footage from which biologists can identify the individual fish species present. Here we explore the relevance of spatial dependence and marine park boundaries while estimating the distribution and habitat associations of the commercially and recreationally important snapper species Chrysophrys auratus in Moreton Bay Marine Park during a period when new Marine National Parks zoned as no-take or “green” areas (i.e., areas with no legal fishing) were introduced. BUV studies typically enforce a minimum distance among BUV sites, and then assume that observations from different sites are independent conditional on the measured covariates. In this study, we additionally incorporated the spatial dependence among BUV sites into the modelling framework. This modelling approach allowed us to test whether or not the incorporation of highly correlated environmental covariates or the geographic placement of BUV sites produced spatial dependence, which if unaccounted for could lead to model bias. We fitted Bayesian logistic models with and without spatial random effects to determine if the Marine National Park boundaries and available environmental covariates had an effect on snapper presence and habitat preference. Adding the spatial dependence component had little effect on the resulting model parameter estimates that emphasized positive association for particular coastal habitat types by snapper. Strong positive relationships between the presence of snapper and rock habitat, particularly rocky substrate composed of indurated freshwater sediments known as coffee rock, and kelp habitat reinforce the consideration of habitat availability in marine reserve design and the design of any associated monitoring programs. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0136799 August 28, 2015 1 / 19 Assessing Habitat Use by Snapper from Baited Underwater Video Data role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The funding for the fieldwork was jointly (50:50) provided by CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and DERM (Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management). Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction No-take marine reserves are spatial closures where all forms of extraction are banned. They have been promoted as assisting in reducing over-fishing [1], conserving marine biodiversity, restoring populations of endangered species [2] and in restoring lost trophic structure [3]. Over the past few decades, marine reserves have been increasingly recognized as a key component of marine conservation strategies [4, 5]. While marine reserves are generally found to be an effective means of achieving positive conservation outcomes, their success in this regard depends on a range of interacting factors such as being no take, well enforced, old (at least 10 years), large (greater than 100km2), and isolated by deep water or sand [6], as well as containing suitable habitat types [7]. As with any re-allocation of resources, the implementation of marine reserves is socially and economically complex with potential tradeoffs. Given the uncertainty of the ecological effects of marine reserves and their often contentious nature [8] the evaluation of the effectiveness of marine reserve conservation outcomes forms an important part of most marine conservation strategies, and ideally incorporates adaptive management [9]. The increasing number and extent of marine reserves reinforces the need for efficiently designed monitoring and information systems that inform their management. Marine reserve protection may particularly benefit actively fished species that exhibit high site fidelity, such as snapper (Chrysophrys auratus) in southeast Queensland, Australia [10, 11], which are the most abundantly harvested rock reef species in this region [12]. Snapper are an iconic species actively targeted by both professional and recreational fishers, and in the past the sustainability of stocks have been of concern [13, 14]. Snapper are a suitable candidate for marine reserve protection because of relatively localised movement patterns in their behavior [15]. No-take areas have been successful in increasing both biomass and abundance of snapper, most notably in New Zealand at the Poor Knights [16], Leigh [17], Hahei and Tawharanui Marine Reserves [18]. The effectiveness of no-take areas in protecting snapper populations has been more variable in Australia however [19, 20]. Ideally no-take areas should protect the preferred habitat of a conserved species. Snapper populations likely contain heterogeneous behavioral patterns with habitat preferences that change with season and age [21]. Adult snapper have been suggested to be residential over rocky reef habitat relative to soft sediment habitats that have fewer resources [22, 23], which suggests that the availability of suitable habitat should be accounted for when determ (...truncated)