A brief story of spatial modeling at southwestern Atlantic Ocean

Abstract Spatial modeling of marine species is widely developed for biogeography, ecology and management purposes. However, hundreds of articles have been concentrated in the northern hemisphere marine environments and only a few dozens for the southern hemisphere. Through a bibliometric analysis I identified strong and weak aspects of studies approaching spatial modeling for species inhabiting the southwestern South Atlantic Ocean – SWAO. Studies on marine mammals and seabirds, based on presence-only and scenopoetic input data and through maximum entropy (MaxEnt) and generalized linear/additive models (GLM/GAM) are the highlights. A tiny quantity of articles have investigated the regional impacts of climate changes over species distribution (e.g., species displacement) or added alternatives for the management of fishing activities and its impacts on non-target species (e.g. incidental catch). I listed the articles used as baseline, discuss the aspects of my findings and claim to scientific community the need to strengthen the spatial modeling routine over SWAO.