GMED: Global Marine Environment Datasets for environment visualisation and species distribution modelling

Abstract. The Global Marine Environment Datasets (GMED) is a compilation of publicly available climatic, biological and geophysical environmental layers featuring present, past and future environmental conditions. Marine biologists increasingly utilize geo-spatial techniques with modelling algorithms to visualize and predict species biodiversity at a global scale. Marine environmental datasets available for species distribution modelling (SDM) have different spatial resolutions and are frequently provided in assorted file formats. This makes data assembly one of the most time-consuming parts of any study using multiple environmental layers for biogeography visualization or SDM applications. GMED covers the widest available range of environmental layers from a variety of sources and depths from the surface to the deepest part of the ocean. It has a uniform spatial extent, high-resolution land mask (to eliminate land areas in the marine regions), and high spatial resolution (5 arc-minute, c. 9.2 km near equator). The free public online availability of GMED enables rapid map overlay of species of interest (e.g. endangered or invasive) against different environmental conditions of the past, present and the future, and expedites mapping distribution ranges of species using popular SDM algorithms. GMED can be found at http://gmed.auckland.ac.nz/ (DOI: https://10.6084/m9.figshare.5937268).