Estuaries support distinct spawning and nursery habitats for migratory fishes, yet the differential environmental response patterns between these two critical early life habitats remain poorly understood from a spatial non-stationarity perspective. Based on six ichthyoplankton surveys conducted during peak and late spawning seasons from 2018 to 2020 in the Yangtze Estuary, this study applied geographically weighted regression...

Estuaries provide nursery habitats for a variety of fish species of different ecological guilds and have complicated environmental conditions. In this study, we applied ensemble species distribution models (SDMs) to four abundant and different ecological guild larval fish species (Hemiculter bleekeri (freshwater guild), Pseudolaubuca sinensis (freshwater guild), Coilia mystus (brackish water guild), and Engraulis japonicus (ma...

Spatial environmental heterogeneity in the Yangtze River Estuary (YRE) is always mentioned but rarely quantified and included in the evaluation process. This study introduced the habitat suitability index evaluation model based on the Gini index (HSIgini) to evaluate the optimal ranges of suitable environmental factors for three typical estuarine gobies, i.e., Rhinogobius giurinus, Acentrogobius pflaumii, Odontamblyopus rubicu...

Unmanned surface vessels (USVs) are required to perform motion prediction during a task. This is essential for USVs, especially when conducting motion control, and this work has been proven to be complicated. In this paper, an off-line black box modeling method for USV maneuvering, the Sparrow search algorithm-based weighted-least-squares support vector machine (SSA-WLS-SVM) was proposed to recognize the motion model of a USV....

Estuaries, as important fish nursery habitats, usually include a variety of larval fishes of different ecological guilds and exhibit complicated changing environmental conditions. We carried out a survey to examine the spatiotemporal dynamics of different ecological guild larval fishes and their relationships with environmental factors in the springs and summers from 2018 to 2020 in the Yangtze Estuary (China). The aims of the...

A fishery-independent survey can provide detailed information for fishery assessment and management. However, the sampling design for the survey on ichthyoplankton in the estuary area is still poorly understood. In this study, we developed six stratified schemes with various sample sizes, attempting to find cost-efficient sampling designs for monitoring Coilia mystus ichthyoplankton in the Yangtze Estuary. The generalized addi...

The estuarine areas provide necessary spawning habitat, nursing habitat, and migratory for a variety of fishes and the environmental conditions are of significant heterogeneity. Coilia mystus is the key commercial fish that spawns in the Yangtze Estuary and the yield has declined sharply in the past 30 years. In order to understand the spawning habitat selection mechanism of C. mystus , the geographically weighted regression (...