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Effective conservation planning requires biotic data across an entire region. In data-poor ecosystems conservation planning is informed by using environmental surrogates (e.g. temperature) predominantly in two ways: to develop habitat classification schemes (1) or develop species distribution models (2). We test the utility of both approaches for conservation planning of marine ecosystems, and rank environmental surrogates, such as depth and distance from shore, according to their power to predict the distribution and abundance of biotic species. Specifically, we compared a habitat classification scheme; based on coarse levels of habitat types derived from depth and distance from shore; against species distribution models, which predict fish abundance and prevalence as a function of environmental surrogates (depth, distance from shore, latitude, reef area, zoning, and several metrics of habitat structural …