Predicted benthic cover of Porites lobata in the Hawaiian Islands

The data files are output from a model to predict the benthic cover of Porites lobata in the Hawaiian Islands. Coral cover was modeled with boosted regression trees (BRT) in R software using data from coral cover surveys and environmental covariates derived from models and/or observations including wave height, benthic geomorphology, and downwelled irradiance. The best performing BRT model was used to predict P. lobata cover for the entire geographic study domain. Data and model output represent conditions for shallow coral reefs in the Hawaiian Islands from 0 m to -30 m depth over the time period 2000-2009. The "mhi_plob.zip" file contains two files: an ascii raster grid file of predicted benthic cover of the coral species Porites lobata as a proportion (0-1.0) (“mhi_ plob.asc”) and a projection file that describes the geographic projection and datum of the ascii file (“mhi_ plob.prj”). The ascii file includes a six line header section with data in 10,940 columns (“ncols”) and 6,841 rows (“nrows”) georegistered to 18.88N, 160.27W at the lower left corner of the grid (“xllcorner”, “yllcorner”). Grid cell size is 0.0005 (which approximates a 50 m grid cell in the study area) and no data values are -9999. Further details on methodology and results are contained in Franklin et al. (2013) Predictive modeling of coral distribution and abundance in the Hawaiian Islands. MEPS 481:121-131