Seawater carbonate chemistry and net calcification during experiments with coral communities, 2009

DOI

Acidification of seawater owing to oceanic uptake of atmospheric CO2 originating from human activities such as burning of fossil fuels and land-use changes has raised serious concerns regarding its adverse effects on corals and calcifying communities. Here we demonstrate a net loss of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) material as a result of decreased calcification and increased carbonate dissolution from replicated subtropical coral reef communities (n=3) incubated in continuous-flow mesocosms subject to future seawater conditions. The calcifying community was dominated by the coral Montipora capitata. Daily average community calcification or Net Ecosystem Calcification (NEC=CaCO3 production - dissolution) was positive at 3.3 mmol CaCO3 m-2 h-1 under ambient seawater pCO2 conditions as opposed to negative at -0.04 mmol CaCO3 m-2 h-1 under seawater conditions of double the ambient pCO2. These experimental results provide support for the conclusion that some net calcifying communities could become subject to net dissolution in response to anthropogenic ocean acidification within this century. Nevertheless, individual corals remained healthy, actively calcified (albeit slower than at present rates), and deposited significant amounts of CaCO3 under the prevailing experimental seawater conditions of elevated pCO2.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Lavigne and Gattuso, 2011) 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).

Supplement to: Andersson, Andreas J; Kuffner, Ilsa B; Mackenzie, Fred T; Jokiel, Paul L; Rodgers, Ku'ulei; Tan, A (2009): Net Loss of CaCO3 from a subtropical calcifying community due to seawater acidification: mesocosm-scale experimental evidence. Biogeosciences, 6(8), 1811-1823

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.727545
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-6-1811-2009
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.727545
Provenance
Creator Andersson, Andreas J; Kuffner, Ilsa B ORCID logo; Mackenzie, Fred T; Jokiel, Paul L; Rodgers, Ku'ulei ORCID logo; Tan, A
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Nisumaa, Anne-Marin
Publication Year 2009
Funding Reference Seventh Framework Programme https://doi.org/10.13039/100011102 Crossref Funder ID 211384 https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/211384 European Project on Ocean Acidification; Sixth Framework Programme https://doi.org/10.13039/100011103 Crossref Funder ID 511106 https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/511106 European network of excellence for Ocean Ecosystems Analysis
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Supplementary Dataset; Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 1086 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Temporal Coverage Begin 2006-06-21T12:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2006-06-22T12:00:00Z