Data from: Predicting oxygen thresholds of marine taxa to improve ecological forecasts

Species’ ranges are shifting in response to increasing temperature and
decreasing oxygen in coastal oceans. Predicting these shifts is limited by
information on physiological oxygen thresholds and how they depend on
temperature. Here we collate laboratory-derived measurements of a common
oxygen threshold, pcrit, for 148 animal species that span six phyla, and
fit a hierarchical model based on taxonomy to impute threshold values for
all based on taxonomy, body size, and environmental temperature. As
expected, pcrit increased with increasing temperature and body size, and
these temperature- and body size effects were broadly similar among
species. Generally, variation in pcrit measurements was estimated to be
most pronounced at the taxonomic family and species level, although the
partitioning of variance was relatively imprecise. We demonstrate
application of these estimates for species distribution modeling of six
groundfish species that reside in the coastal waters of the U.S. and
Canadian Pacific coast, finding that models that used imputed values
sometimes – but not always – improved the performance of species
distribution models compared to models that use environmental pO2 alone.
This modeling framework and data can support species distribution modeling
for marine species by providing an alternative way to consider the role of
shifting oxygen levels and temperatures on species ranges.