Shift from coral to macroalgae dominance on a volcanically acidified reef

DOI

Rising anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere is accompanied by an increase in oceanic CO2 and a concomitant decline in seawater pH (ref. 1). This phenomenon, known as ocean acidification (OA), has been experimentally shown to impact the biology and ecology of numerous animals and plants2, most notably those that precipitate calcium carbonate skeletons, such as reef-building corals3. Volcanically acidified water at Maug, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) is equivalent to near-future predictions for what coral reef ecosystems will experience worldwide due to OA. We provide the first chemical and ecological assessment of this unique site and show that acidification-related stress significantly influences the abundance and diversity of coral reef taxa, leading to the often-predicted shift from a coral to an algae-dominated state4, 5. This study provides field evidence that acidification can lead to macroalgae dominance on reefs.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2015) 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 is 2016-10-28.

Supplement to: Enochs, I C; Manzello, Derek P; Donham, E M; Kolodziej, Graham; Okano, R; Johnston, Lyza; Young, Craig S; Iguel, John; Edwards, C B; Fox, M D; Valentino, L; Johnson, Steven; Benavente, D; Clark, S J; Carlton, R; Burton, T; Eynaud, Y; Price, Nichole N (2015): Shift from coral to macroalgae dominance on a volcanically acidified reef. Nature Climate Change, 5(12), 1083-1088

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.867324
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2758
Related Identifier https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/metadata/landing-page/bin/iso?id=gov.noaa.nodc:0138649
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.867324
Provenance
Creator Enochs, I C; Manzello, Derek P ORCID logo; Donham, E M ORCID logo; Kolodziej, Graham; Okano, R; Johnston, Lyza; Young, Craig S; Iguel, John; Edwards, C B; Fox, M D; Valentino, L ORCID logo; Johnson, Steven ORCID logo; Benavente, D ORCID logo; Clark, S J; Carlton, R; Burton, T; Eynaud, Y; Price, Nichole N ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2015
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 9300 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (145.217 LON, 20.017 LAT)