Decadal changes in California’s temperate mesophotic reef invertebrate community through the 2014-2016 Northeast Pacific marine heatwave

This repository contains R scripts and datasets used for the analysis presented in "Decadal changes in California’s temperate mesophotic reef invertebrate community through the 2014-2016 Northeast Pacific marine heatwave". The code includes workflows for data processing, interpolation, and visualisation of bottom temperature climatology and anomalies. All analyses were conducted in R (version 2.2.2) to ensure full reproducibility.

Biological data are derived from remotely operated vehicle (ROV) surveys conducted by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and Marine Applied Research and Exploration (MARE) between 2005 and 2021. Surveys targeted marine protected areas (MPAs) and adjacent reference sites, following a standardised protocol for long-term monitoring. Sites were selected based on survey coverage across three periods: pre-2014, during the 2014–2016 marine heatwave (MHW), and post-2016.

Environmental data include NOAA OI SST V2 High Resolution Dataset (NOAA PSL) and monthly mean seawater potential temperature from the GLORYS12V1 product (Copernicus Marine Service).