The Genetic diversity of marine habitat-forming species database gathers information on genetic diversity estimates obtained from microsatellites, considering seven different taxa (bryozoan, hexacoral, hydrozoa, octocoral, seagrass, seaweed, and sponge).

Database collection

A literature survey was conducted on the 28th of October 2019 on the ISI Web of Science using different search strategies combining the word “microsatellite” and the following different keywords: “bryozoan”, “coral”, “eelgrass”, “fucoid”, “gorgonian”, “kelp”, “macroalgae”, “octocoral”, “porifera”, “seagrass”, “seaweed”, “sponge”. We selected 264 from a total of 809 publications, filtering the land and freshwater records, as well as the publications that do not analyse marine habitat-forming species, genetic data, the publications that do not use microsatellites to estimate genetic diversity or the publications analysing farm samples (i.e. non-wild populations). Moreover, publications which did not specify coordinates neither in the publication nor in the supporting information were also removed from the database.

Database processing

One database record corresponds to one local population - considered as a group of colonies, specimens, or individuals of the same species - in a specific geographic location defined by latitude and longitude coordinates and by a depth range. For each record or population, the following information is provided: Species name, Latitude and Longitude in World Geodesic System 1984 (WGS 84), Loci, Number of samples (N_samples), Number of Individuals (N_individuals), Number of alleles (Na), Observed heterozygosity (Ho), Expected heterozygosity (He), FIS, and Allelic richness (Ar).

We added the variable “Taxa” (bryozoan, hexacoral, hydrozoan, octocoral, seagrass, seaweed, and sponge) in the database. We reviewed the non-accepted and wrongly named species extracted from the original publications by using the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) Taxon Match tool

All database records were assigned to a marine ecoregion (the smallest-scale units in the Marine Ecoregions of the World – MeoW – system) and to a marine province (the slightly large areas in MeoW which include one or more ecoregions) according to Spalding et al., (2007). They were spatially joined using the geographic coordinates of each database record and the polygon shapefile of each marine ecoregion and province, using the function getRegions of the R package "meowR" (Byrnes 2016). Thus, the variables "ECOREGION", "PROVINCE", and "REALM were included in the database.

We also added a Marine Protected Area (MPA) variable by using the Protected Planet database. We defined each database record as protected – record matching with the MPA status “Adopted”, “Designated”, and “Inscribed” – and not protected – record not matching with any MPA or matching with the MPA status “Proposed” or “Established”. Thus, we added the variable "MPA" (1 / 0 If the samples are from inside of Marine Protection Area or not according to the Protected Planted database). Moreover, we included variables related to each MPA description in Protected Planet (e.g. MPA Name, MPA Status, MPA year).

References

Byrnes, J. (2016). meowR: Marine Ecoregions of the World in R. R package version 0.6.2.

Spalding, M.D., Fox, H.E., Allen, G.R., Davidson, N., Ferdaña, Z.A., Finlayson, M., et al. (2007). Marine ecoregions of the world: A bioregionalization of coastal and shelf areas. Bioscience