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To examine the potential of remotely sensed abiotic measures as surrogates for the abundance, diversity and community composition of temperate rocky reef fishes and sessile invertebrates.

Batemans Marine Park, south‐eastern Australia.

We used high‐resolution bathymetric side‐scan sonar imagery to quantify abiotic measures of rocky reef habitat, within a marine protected area (MPA), and examine the relationship between abiotic measures and (1) sessile invertebrate abundance, (2) sessile invertebrate species richness, (3) total fish abundance, (4) fish species richness, and (5) Monacanthidae abundance using generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs). We chose GAMMs as the preferred statistical analysis to account for the spatial autocorrelation present in our data.

We found a strong positive relationship between abiotic measures and sessile invertebrate abundance …