DE003002

The map presentsapreliminary result of a currently running project on benthic habitat mapping in the German North Sea funded and coordinated by the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation(Bildstein et al. 2014, Pesch et al. 2016). Full coverage biotope mapping was accomplishedby applying Random Forests on site specific data on six infaunacommunitiesand predictor data on e.g. topographical and sedimentological features of the sea floor for a 600 m x 600 m raster. The benthic communities had been derived from infauna abundance data by use of fuzzy clustering (for corresponding methodological details please refer to Fiorentino et al. 2017).