Description
Continuous long-term monitoring is important for detecting ecological changes and understanding their causes, including anthropogenic impacts such as climate changes and eutrophication. Nonetheless, such long-term population studies have been rare, especially for sea urchins, which can affect community dynamics owing to their extensive herbivory and large population fluctuations. Here we present a long-term (from 1963 to 2014) dynamics of sea urchins in a fixed quadrat on a lower intertidal rocky flat in Hatakejima Island, southern Japan. We also conducted a complementary survey over the entire island approximately every five years from 1975 to 2013, and a 41-year assay for developmental abnormality of the sea urchin Heliocidaris crassispina using water adjacent to the island. The abundance of three commonest species in this area (H. crassispina, Echinostrephus molaris, and Echinometra spp.) and the richness of urchin species showed large variations, with high numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by an abrupt decline in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and a gradual recovery subsequently. The species abundance and richness in the entire island survey showed good correlations with those in the quadrat census. Statistical analyses indicated that increasing water temperature and red tides were the major factors influencing the dynamics of abundance and species richness. Our studies reveal that anthropogenic environmental changes influence the long-term dynamics in abundance and richness of sea urchins. The data were digitized and transformed to comply with the Darwin Core/OBIS Schema in 2020.
Data Records
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 480 records.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
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How to cite
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
Ohgaki, S., T. Kato, N. Kobayashi, H. Tanase, N. H. Kumagai, S. Ishida, T. Nakano, Y. Wada and Y. Yusa (2019) Effects of temperature and red tides on sea urchin abundance and species richness over 45 years in southern Japan. Ecological Indicators, 96, 684-693.
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is National Museum of Nature and Science, Japan. To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 086b53ed-1266-41e9-858c-38ab2f08ae6a. National Museum of Nature and Science, Japan publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF Japan.
Keywords
Occurrence; Occurrence
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