Meta-analysis reveals controls on oyster predation 1977-2021

This dataset was created for investigating the patterns and drivers of variation in predation strength on oysters. Predation on oysters has been the subject of intense study because oysters are vital to creating coastal habitat, sustaining biodiversity, and enhancing or stabilizing important ecosystem functions. Understanding how predators affect oyster populations is important given the global decline in oysters and the substantial efforts focused on re-establishment and conservation. Despite widespread losses of oyster reefs, there have been no standardized and integrated quantitative assessments of the influence of predators on oysters. Therefore, this dataset was created by combining the results of 49 peer-reviewed articles reporting 384 experiments on oyster predation. These field and laboratory experiments tested whether the presence of predators affects oyster mortality or recruitment. The combined data was used in a meta-analysis, the results of which are published in the paper titled Meta-analysis reveals controls on oyster predation (Tedford and Castorani 2022), which represents the first quantitative synthesis to show that across a range of environments, predators have strong impacts on oysters.