Seawater carbonate chemistry and recruitment and succession in a tropical benthic community

DOI

Ocean acidification is a pervasive threat to coral reef ecosystems, and our understanding of the ecological processes driving patterns in tropical benthic community development in conditions of acidification is limited. We deployed limestone recruitment tiles in low aragonite saturation (Omega arag) waters during an in-situ field experiment at Puerto Morelos, Mexico, and compared them to tiles placed in control zones over a 14-month investigation. The early stages of succession showed relatively little difference in coverage of calcifying organisms between the low Omega arag and control zones. However, after 14 months of development, tiles from the low Omega arag zones had up to 70% less cover of calcifying organisms coincident with 42% more fleshy algae than the controls. The percent cover of biofilm and turf algae was also significantly greater in the low Omega arag zones, while the number of key grazing taxa remained constant. We hypothesize that fleshy algae have a competitive edge over the primary calcified space holders, coralline algae, and that acidification leads to altered competitive dynamics between various taxa. We suggest that as acidification impacts reefs in the future, there will be a shift in community assemblages away from upright and crustose coralline algae toward more fleshy algae and turf, established in the early stages of succession.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2016) was used to compute a complete and consistent set of carbonate system variables, as described by Nisumaa et al. (2010). In this dataset the original values were archived in addition with the recalculated parameters (see related PI). The date of carbonate chemistry calculation by seacarb is 2017-09-29.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.881171
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146707
Related Identifier https://www.bco-dmo.org/dataset/564766
Related Identifier https://cran.r-project.org/package=seacarb
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.881171
Provenance
Creator Crook, Elizabeth Derse; Kroeker, Kristy J ORCID logo; Potts, Donald C; Rebolledo-Vieyra, Mario; Hernandez-Terrones, Laura M ORCID logo; Paytan, Adina ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2016
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 16432 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-86.861W, 20.878S, -86.861E, 20.879N)
Temporal Coverage Begin 2010-08-28T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2011-10-19T00:00:00Z