2022 Report of Working Group 47 on Ecology of Seamounts

The business meeting focused on introductions of national representatives and observers, discussions of WG 47’s terms of reference and exchange of information and ideas about participants’ seamount research activities. [...] AGENDA ITEM 5 Review of WG 47 terms of reference There has been a bit of a COVID lull and relatively slow progress on WG 47’s terms of reference the past couple of years. [...] (2) Participants recognized the World Ocean Atlas data used by WG 32 (Biodiversity of Biogenic Habitats) have been updated and are available to WG 47, which will help members identify environmental and ecological predictors of the distribution and biodiversity of seamount taxa in the North Pacific Ocean and develop one or more species distribution models for seamount taxa. [...] Some of the highlights of that workshop included discussions about the importance of considering bentho-pelagic coupling when predicting distributions of benthic taxa, including deep-sea corals and sponges. [...] (1) WG 47’s 2-day workshop (W1) on “Distributions of pelagic, demersal, and benthic species associated with seamounts in the North Pacific Ocean and factors influencing their distributions” which was convened in September 2022 identified and discussed environmental and ecological predictors of species associated with seamounts and… (2) reviewed a few case studies of modelling approaches to predict.