Enhancing ecological complexity in soft-bottom coastal ecosystems: the impact of introducing hard substrates - Data

Coastal ecosystems globally face pressures, with natural coastal habitats being replaced by engineered structures. While hard structures for navigation-purposes and coastal defence can negatively impact native communities, they can also be applied in ecological restoration as artificial reefs to stimulate epibenthic species. This way substrates facilitate establishment of biogenic (shellfish) reefs and provide habitat heterogeneity in soft-sediment ecosystems. In a 1.5-year experiment, we introduced six different types of natural or biodegradable hard substrates in a subtidal soft-sediment system. We compared the substrates with surrounding soft sediment and evaluated differences between substrate types using biodiversity indices, community composition analyses and food web indicators. This offers a comprehensive understanding of how the introduced hard substrates affect ecosystem complexity. This dataset and the correspponding R-scripts were used for the statistics as presented in the paper. It contains a metadata file, and datafiles containing the following: sediment data, benthic species observed in the experiment, mobile species observed in the experiment. R scripts can be used to calculate biodiversity, community composition and food web metrics on the different types of substrates.