Hello,
I am in the beginning stages of developing a model to depict habitat suitability of an invasive marine fish. I have a comprehensive vector map of all the habitats in the bay that I am modeling, but since this fish is very generalist we will have to base suitability on ambient water quality parameters.The local monitoring agency has provided me with 12 years of data from 12 stations where water quality parameters (salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen) are collected 3 times a month.
At this point I have some idea of what I need to do, which would involve some interpolation (i.e. IDW, kriging, spline, etc.) of these values across my entire area, but need some more advice on how to do it. The end goal is to create a map showing filled contours where one represents prime habitat suitability (based on prior physiological studies) and all others show standard deviations above or below this range. This will be done for each month, and then manipulated to time lapse over the entire year. In my opinion, this will give a good idea of where this species may inhabit, even if it is only marginal habitat.
Does anyone have advice on how I can interpolate these 3 variables and then combine them somehow to produce an output layer with contours based on defined parameters (i.e. 1 = 24-27C, 34-37ppt, 6-6.3 mg/L) that incorporates all three.
Any advice would be most helpful.
Thanks,
Nick
