Environmental Drivers of Habitat Suitability for Shortbill Spearfish (Tetrapturus angustirostris) in the Pacific Ocean: A Comparison of Single and Ensemble Models
Yiwei Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Heyang Huang, Yanan Li, Feng Wu, Siquan Tian · 2026
Read Environmental Drivers of Habitat Suitability for Shortbill Spearfish (Tetrapturus angustirostris) in the Pacific Ocean: A Comparison of Single and Ensemble Models by Yiwei Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Heyang Huang, Yanan Li, Feng Wu, Siquan Tian (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13565389.txt.
Description
Yiwei Yang and co-authors model where the shortbill spearfish lives across the Pacific, and which sea conditions draw it there. Knowing the fish's habitat helps longline fleets avoid catching it by accident. Their 2026 paper uses observer records from the Chinese Pacific tuna fishery, nearly twenty thousand longline sets gathered from 2010 to 2021.
The team compared five single prediction methods against three ways of blending models into ensembles. A stacking ensemble scored best, with a random forest model close behind, and both beat the weighted blends. Saltiness of the water stood out as the strongest habitat clue, followed by plankton pigment, distance to shore, and dissolved oxygen. Adding the sheer number of hooks changed the maps only slightly. The results give fishery managers a tested map of where spearfish concentrate, and a short list of the conditions that predict them.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Yiwei Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Heyang Huang, Yanan Li, Feng Wu, Siquan Tian |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 44 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |