Data presented here were collected between January 2020 to December 2020 within the research unit DynaCom (Spatial community ecology in highly dynamic landscapes: From island biogeography to metaecosystems, https://uol.de/dynacom/ ) of the Universities of Oldenburg, Göttingen, and Münster, the iDiv Leipzig and the Nationalpark Niedersächsisches Wattenmeer. Experimental islands and saltmarsh enclosed plots were created in the back barrier tidal flat and in the saltmarsh zone of the island of Spiekeroog. Temperature in the sediment surface layer (in approximately 0.05m depth) was measured with DEFI-T miniature temperature recorders (JFE Advantech Co., Ltd., Tokyo; DEFI-T). The manufacturer pre-calibrated temperature recorders and were installed on the experimental islands and in salt-marsh enclosed plots at different elevation levels. Recorded data were internally logged until the readout with the DEFI Series software (V1.02). The position was derived from a portable DGPS-system. Date and Time is given in UTC. Data handling was performed according to Zielinski et al. (2018): Post-processing of collected data was done using MATLAB (R2018a). Quality control was performed by (a) erasing data covering maintenance activities, (b) removing outliers, defined as data exhibiting changes of more than two standard deviations within one time step, and (c) visually checks.