AquaX supersedes AquaMaps in US waters
Datasets — AquaX (ax) joins as a ninth contributing input — an enhanced and revised AquaMaps framework (Reygondeau et al. 2026): 10,536 ensemble habitat-suitability models delivered on the analysis grid itself and masked to US waters. For the same species it supersedes AquaMaps wherever AquaX was modeled (10,517 species, 10,703 AquaMaps models); AquaMaps continues for the ~6,000 species AquaX did not model and everywhere outside AquaX’s mask. A further 2,742 species AquaX modeled but found absent in US waters keep their AquaMaps surface in this pre-release, pending review.
Methods — Extinction risk becomes spatial for species listed by Distinct Population Segment: 18 species whose ESA listing applies to some populations only (humpback and Southern Resident killer whales, Cook Inlet beluga, the salmonid ESUs, both sturgeons, …) take each listed entity’s status inside its designated critical habitat, from NOAA Fisheries’ authoritative service, and the baseline every unlisted species of its kind gets (the MMPA floor for a marine mammal, the IUCN category otherwise) across the rest of their range. Their merged model stays the habitat suitability; the per-cell risk is carried beside it and multiplied in at scoring, and is offered in the species app as its own layer. Before this the humpback carried the Endangered status of DPSs that breed outside US waters everywhere it occurs, a flat maximum across its entire range. Supersession is a filter on the merge input, not a per-cell blend: inside the AquaX mask a superseded species’ AquaMaps cells are dropped before the merge, so an AquaX absence is an absence. Values are AquaX’s 0–1000 ensemble mean ÷ 10, on AquaMaps’ 0–100 scale; the model’s TSS cutoff is recorded but not applied. Every other rule — range constraint, governing extinction risk, turtle multiplication — is unchanged, and a control run with supersession switched off reproduces v8’s Program-Area scores exactly.
Reported units — Scores are reported on 20 programarea, 12 ecoregion, 5 subregion — unchanged from the previous release.
Scope — Scoring extent and species definition are unchanged from v8; what changes is which model supplies suitability for two thirds of the scored species inside US waters.
Technology — A same-grid version bump now reuses the previous release’s unchanged ingests (copy-on-write clone, verified against their content checkpoints) instead of re-running them, and every reader of the previous release resolves its schema by introspection.
Measured against v8: datasets added: ax, dps_nmfs; valid species 17,112 → 17,130.