Black corals are antipatharian corals that occur from sublittoral to abyssal depths on hard, mixed and soft substrates. Under favourable conditions, some black coral species form dense stands known as black coral gardens which create habitat for a variety of associated species.

Circalittoral faunal turfs are animal-dominated shelf assemblages that are found on hard substrata between the lower limit of the infralittoral zone and the shelf edge. Benthic organisms generally form dense intricate mixes that may include tall alcyonarians, sponges, hydroids, scleractinians and gorgonians, as well as less prominent fauna such as encrusting sponges, bryozoans, ascidians, bivalves, solitary cup corals, serpulid worms and vermetid gastropods.

Rhodoliths is a general term used to designate non-geniculate coralline red algae (Rhodophyta) that live unattached (Riosmena-Rodríguez, 2017). The term is used here to encompass (i) branched free-living coralline algae devoid of an evident nucleus, but also (ii) nucleated nodules where the biogenic calcium carbonate deposit around the core represents >50%, as well as (iii) “coated grains” where the core is larger than the algal carbonate component.

<p>3-D habitat suitability maps (HSM) or probability of occurrence maps, built using Shape-Constrained Generalized Additive Models (SC-GAMs) for the 30 main commercial species of the Atlantic region.</p><p>Predictor variables for each species were selected from: sea water temperature, salinity, nitrate, net primary productivity, distance to seafloor, distance to coast, and relative position to mixed layer depth. Each species HSM contains 47 maps, one per depth level from 0 to 1000 m. Probability values of each map range from 0 (unsuitable habitat) to 1 (optimal habitat). For depth levels below the 0.99 quantile of the depth values found on the species occurrence data, NA values were assigned. Maps have been masked to species native range regions. See Valle et al. (2024) in Ecological Modelling 490:110632 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2024.110632), for more details.</p>