Data presented here were collected between January 2019 to September 2019 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.Meteorological data were collected near the experimental setup, with a locally installed weather station located approximately 500m north of the southern shoreline. The weather station system used here was a ClimaSensor US 4.920x.00.00x that was pre-calibrated by the manufacturer (Adolf Thies GmbH & Co. KG, D-Göttingen). Data were recorded and saved within the Meteo-Online (V4.5.0.20253) software in a sampling interval of 1 min, with an averaging time of 10 s. Date and time were given in UTC and the position was derived from the internal GPS system.Data handling was performed according to Zielinski et al. (2018, doi:10.5194/essd-10-1843-2018): 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.