Predictive Modeling of Coral Disease Distribution within a Reef System 英文参考文献.docVIP

PredictiveModelingofCoralDiseaseDistributionwithin aReefSystem GarethJ.Williams1*,GretaS.Aeby2,RebeccaO.M.Cowie1,SimonK.Davy1* 1SchoolofBiologicalSciences,VictoriaUniversityofWellington,Wellington,NewZealand,2HawaiiInstituteofMarineBiology,Kaneohe,Hawaii,UnitedStatesofAmerica Abstract Diseasesoftendisplaycomplexanddistinctassociationswiththeirenvironmentduetodifferencesinetiology,modesof transmissionbetweenhosts,andtheshiftingbalancebetweenpathogenvirulenceandhostresistance.Statisticalmodeling hasbeenunderutilizedincoraldiseaseresearchtoexplorethespatialpatternsthatresultfromthistriadofinteractions.We tested the hypotheses that: 1) coral diseases show distinct associations with multiple environmental factors, 2) incorporating interactions (synergistic collinearities) among environmental variables is important when predicting coral diseasespatialpatterns,and3)modelingoverallcoraldiseaseprevalence(theprevalenceofmultiplediseasesasasingle proportionvalue)willincreasepredictiveerrorrelativetomodelingthesamediseasesindependently.Fourcoraldiseases: Poritesgrowthanomalies(PorGA),Poritestissueloss(PorTL),Poritestrematodiasis(PorTrem),andMontiporawhitesyndrome (MWS),andtheirinteractionswith17predictorvariablesweremodeledusingboostedregressiontrees(BRT)withinareef system in Hawaii. Each disease showed distinct associations with the predictors. Environmental predictors showing the strongest overall associations with the coral diseases were both biotic and abiotic. PorGA was optimally predicted by a negative association with turbidity, PorTL and MWS by declines in butterflyfish and juvenile parrotfish abundance respectively, and PorTrem by a modal relationship with Porites host cover. Incorporating interactions among predictor variables contributed tothepredictive power ofour models,particularly for PorTrem.Combining diseases (using overall diseaseprevalenceasthemodelresponse),ledtoanaveragesix-foldincreaseincross-validationpredictivedevianceover modeling the diseases indivi