Predictive Modeling of Juvenile Smalltooth Sawfish Habitats: Challenges and Opportunities for Conservation.

Effective conservation of rare species necessitates the identification of critical habitats and their specific features that influence species occurrence. This study focused on smalltooth sawfish (), a critically endangered elasmobranch, to explore how predictive spatial modeling can enhance conservation efforts. By leveraging long-term occurrence and relative abundance data from scientific gillnet surveys, along with in situ environmental data, we used boosted regression trees (BRT) to pinpoint key habitat features essential for juvenile sawfish.