Identifying key species in marsh food web responses to The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: A literature review

These data are the result of a synthesis of published literature. A workshop was convened in October 2015 with the goal of identifying key species in the response of marsh food webs to oil. The majority of the literature review was conducted at this workshop, and was continued into early 2016 (completed by March 2016). Our synthesis consisted of literature reviews focusing on: 1) studies of trophic relationships of marsh organisms, and 2) studies of oil sensitivity of marsh organisms. This synthesis allowed us to build a food web model of a Louisiana salt marsh and quantify the topological importance of each taxon in that web. We then combined information of food web importance and sensitivity to oil to identify the taxa that are critical for the response of the overall food web to oil.