Invertebrate community composition in a New England fouling community

Fouling communities are tractable ecological systems that form on manmade structures added to the marine environment. Their proximity to the water’s surface allows hypotheses about community assembly, disturbance, and invasion biology to be tested and these communities have become model systems in the marine realm. Much of this work has focused on sessile invertebrates but, on hard substrates in the marine environment, invertebrates and macroalgae, organisms from two different kingdoms, can compete for the same limiting resource, space. On rocky reefs, macroalgae and invertebrates are partitioned between horizontal and vertical walls respectively, but invertebrates are able to persist on horizontal surfaces if algae are excluded by shading, suggesting that algae presence may exclude invertebrates or impact invertebrate post-settlement mortality. I conducted four manipulative experiments on floating docks to test if algae also excluded invertebrates in fouling communities, including pote..., I conducted four experiments in a New England fouling communities to investigate if macroalgae exclude sessile invertebrates on the shallow sunlit sides of floating docks, as well as potential mechanisms for this. The experiments were carried out at a depth of 1m on polycarbonate settlement plates suspended vertically off floating docks at Dorchester Yacht Club, Boston, Massachusetts, (42.305556°N, 71.046111°W). The fouling community was composed of sessile algae and invertebrates typical of this region, including red and green algae, sponges, bryozoans, polychaetes, molluscs, barnacles, and colonial and solitary ascidians.
At the end of the experiments, settlement plates were collected, all algae and arborescent invertebrates trimmed to enable primary space occupiers to be identified, and communities photographed using an Olympus Stylus Tough 8010 camera. Digital photographs were later enlarged on a screen and percent cover and species richness of space occupying sessile invertebrates ..., , # Data from: Invertebrate community composition in a New England fouling community

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ghx3ffbxv](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ghx3ffbxv)

The data represent the percent cover of sessile invertebrates in a New England Fouling Community for four different experiments.

At the end of the experiment settlement plates were collected, all algae and arborescent invertebrates trimmed to enable primary space occupiers to be identified, and communities photographed using an Olympus Stylus Tough 8010 camera. Digital photographs were later enlarged on a screen and percent cover and species richness of space occupying sessile invertebrates quantified using 200 random points overlaid on the central 12x12 cm area of a settlement plate to avoid edge effects.

## Description of the data and file structure

The data are arranged in columns. The first column gives the name of the experiment, the second column the name of the treatment within the experiment, and the third colu...