Data from: Global patterns in the impacts of consumers on coastal wetland microalgae

Provided here are the datasets and R code for the study entitled "Global patterns in the impacts of consumers on coastal wetland microalgae".

Summary of the study: Microalgae are key primary producers in aquatic ecosystems. Despite anthropogenic impacts on aquatic food webs, however, the impacts of changes in consumer assemblages on microalgae remain poorly understood. Using meta-analysis of 653 measurements of microalgal responses to consumer exclusion or addition treatments, we assessed global patterns in the top-down impact of consumers on microalgae in coastal wetlands. Consumers reduced the abundance of microalgae worldwide by 46% on average, but there were great variations in consumer effects. Consumers tended to have stronger effects on diatoms than on cyanobacteria and in unvegetated rocky shores and sandflats than vegetated salt marshes and mangrove forests. Consumer effects on microalgae were weaker at higher water temperatures and lower latitudes, and stronger at high consumer densities and in longer studies. Our analysis reveals prevalent but variable consumer impacts on microalgae in coastal wetlands globally and highlights that the processes mediating this variation may differ from those controlling macroalgae and vascular plants. We suggest that a better understanding of variation in the impact of consumers on microalgae will help manage the positive and negative effects of microalgae under increasing global anthropogenic alterations of food webs.

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1) Liu_Metadata.csv This CSV file contains the metadata for the two spreadsheets2) Liu_Consumer_Effects_on_Microalgae.csv This CSV file contains all the data used in our main analysis3) Liu_Subset_for_Diatom_and_Cyanobacteria.csv This CSV file contains the data for analyzing consumer effects on diatoms versus cyanobacteria.4) Liu_Code.docx This Word file contains the R code (version 1) used.