DE003000

The map depicts the current status of soft bottom infauna biotopes within the German Exclusive Economic Zone of the North Sea according to the new German Red List Biotope classification system (Level 5 - Finck et al. 2017)and was produced within a nationalproject on benthic habitat mapping in the GermanEEZ of theNorth and Baltic 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). In its original form the map depicts six benthic communities including Phoronis. Since inthe new German Red List Biotope classification system Phoronis is dealt with in Level 6 corresponding areas were split and assigned by expert judgement to the Tellina-fabula and Amphiura-filiformis community.