Sponge volume from repeated surveys in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, before and after the 2017 hurricane season

Prior to the 2017 hurricanes, six shallow (8-15 meter depth) reef sites had been selected from the Virgin Islands Territorial Coral Reef Monitoring Program’s (TCRMP) permanent monitoring sites to study variation in sponge communities - Black Point (BP), Coculus Rock (CR), and Magens Bay (MB), which are in embayments with heavily developed watersheds. Buck Island (BI) and Savana Island (SI) are located near undeveloped offshore cays. Botany Bay (BB) is a nearshore site in a bay with a low level of watershed development.

This dataset represents sponge volume from these repeated surveys before and after the 2017 hurricane season. We used three randomly selected transects out of the six permanently established 10-meter TCRMP transects at each site. The same three transects at each site were re-surveyed repeatedly in August 2016 (pre-hurricanes), December 2017 (10 weeks post-hurricanes), March 2018 (24 weeks post-hurricanes), November 2018 (61 weeks post-hurricanes), and July 2019 (93 weeks post-hurricanes).

在2017年飓风来临之前，从维尔京群岛领土珊瑚礁监测计划（TCRMP）的固定监测站点中选定了六个浅水（深度为8-15米）珊瑚礁地点，以研究海绵群落的变化情况。这些地点包括黑点（BP）、椰子岩（CR）和马根斯湾（MB），它们均位于流域高度发达的海湾中。巴克岛（BI）和萨瓦纳岛（SI）位于未开发的海岸外岩礁附近。植物湾（BB）是一个近岸地点，位于流域开发程度较低的海湾中。本数据集代表了这些地点在2017年飓风季节前后重复调查中的海绵体积。在每个地点，我们从六个永久设立的10米TCRMP横断面中随机选取了三条横断面。在每个地点，这三条相同的横断面在2016年8月（飓风前）、2017年12月（飓风后10周）、2018年3月（飓风后24周）、2018年11月（飓风后61周）和2019年7月（飓风后93周）进行了重复调查。