Benthic algae and sessile invertebrate survey data from LTER and other reef ecosystems

Understanding factors that influence ecological stability is a key question in ecology.
Population ecology has highlighted that synchrony within a species across locations is an
important indicator of species stability. Community ecology, in contrast, has highlighted
that asynchrony between species within a location may enhance the stability of aggregate
properties (such as total productivity). We compiled LTER and other data across 20
metacommunities in grassland and coastal marine biomes to integrate population and community
approaches to synchrony to understand drivers of ecosystem stability at different scales.
All datasets feature long-term (10-34 years) measurements of the primary producer community
across multiple (6-49) discrete plots, with taxonomic identifications to species in most or
all cases. This data package contains data from coastal marine sites: Santa Barbara Coastal
LTER; Moorea Coral Reef; US Virgin Islands; Maui, Hawaii; and the Florida Keys.