Keywords: Marine Protected Areas; Biodiversity connectivity Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are key tools for ocean resource management and conservation. They prevent marine biodiversity declines and increase the resilience of ecosystems by protecting critical habitats and spawning biomass, as well as by supplying propagule and adult spillover to adjacent unprotected areas…

Sea ice generates as seawater freezes, and because it is less dense than sea water, it floats throughout the surface of the ocean. Sea ice covers approximately 12% of the world’s oceans, and much of it is enclosed within the polar ice packs: the Arctic ice pack (Arctic Ocean) and…

iNaturalist is a global platform where naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists post their observations with photographs. Observations can be curated by the network of users to provide valuable open data to scientific research projects, conservation agencies and the general public. …

Species distribution models (SDM; for review and definition see, e.g., Peterson et al., 2011) are a dominant paradigm to quantify the relationship between environmental dynamics and several manifestations of species biogeography. …

The major cause of global sea-level change is the exchange of water between ice and ocean during ice ages. The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was the most recent period with ice sheets at their greatest extent (maximum coverage between 26,500 and 19,000 years ago). Massive ice sheets covered much of…

Genetic diversity estimation per site or group of sites can be biased due to unbalanced sampling designs. There is an expected relationship between the number of sampled individuals in a single population and genetic diversity (e.g., as allelic richness; the total number of alleles). To overcome the issue, standardized allelic…

The availability of high-resolution global environmental datasets is crucial to model the relationship between the occurrence or abundance of species and their natural environment. For terrestrial environments, WorldClim has served this purpose since the early 2000s, significantly improving the application in the fields of ecology, biogeography, conservation biology and evolution. …

The glacial and interglacial cycles of the Quaternary were particularly important in shaping the distribution of marine species, with range expansions and contractions responding to climate oscillations. The Last Glacial Maximum was one of the most extreme periods of the Quaternary, resulting in severe reductions in the northern distribution of…

Unlike measuring pairwise terrestrial distances, marine distances need to account for landmasses, which cannot be crossed. Marine distances are a crucial predictor in genetics to build isolation by distance models. These measure gene frequencies variation under increasing geographic distances. When marine distances are plotted against pairwise genetic differentation levels, a…