Seawater carbonate chemistry and net community calcification (NCC) and net community production (NCP) rates of individual taxa and combined reef communities

DOI

There is a long history of examining the impacts of nutrient pollution and pH on coral reefs. However, little is known about how these two stressors interact and influence coral reef ecosystem functioning. Using a six-week nutrient addition experiment, we measured the impact of elevated nitrate (NO−3) and phosphate (PO3−4) on net community calcification (NCC) and net community production (NCP) rates of individual taxa and combined reef communities. Our study had four major outcomes: (i) NCC rates declined in response to nutrient addition in all substrate types, (ii) the mixed community switched from net calcification to net dissolution under medium and high nutrient conditions, (iii) nutrients augmented pH variability through modified photosynthesis and respiration rates, and (iv) nutrients disrupted the relationship between NCC and aragonite saturation state documented in ambient conditions. These results indicate that the negative effect of NO−3 and PO3−4 addition on reef calcification is likely both a direct physiological response to nutrients and also an indirect response to a shifting pH environment from altered NCP rates. Here, we show that nutrient pollution could make reefs more vulnerable to global changes associated with ocean acidification and accelerate the predicted shift from net accretion to net erosion.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2020) 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 2020-10-30.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.924534
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.2718
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.nm1ns61
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.924534
Provenance
Creator Silbiger, N J ORCID logo; Nelson, Craig E ORCID logo; Remple, Kristina; Sevilla, Jessica K; Quinlan, Zachary A ORCID logo; Putnam, H M ORCID logo; Fox, M D; Donahue, M J (ORCID: 0000-0002-7529-001X)
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2018
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 27720 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-157.786 LON, 21.433 LAT)
Temporal Coverage Begin 2015-12-03T10:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2015-12-06T10:00:00Z