Data From: Shortened food chain length in a fished versus unfished coral reef

Direct exploitation through fishing is driving dramatic declines in wildlife populations in ocean environments, particularly for predatory and large-bodied taxa. Despite wide recognition of this pattern and well-established consequences of such trophic downgrading on ecosystem function, there have been few empirical studies examining the effects of fishing on whole system trophic architecture. Understanding these kinds of structural impacts is especially important in coral reef ecosystems - often heavily fished and facing multiple stressors. Given often high dietary flexibility and numerous functional redundancies, especially in diverse ecosystems such as coral reefs, it is important to establish if web architecture is strongly impacted by fishing pressure, or if it might be resilient, at least to moderate intensity pressure. To examine this question, we used a combination of bulk and compound-specific stable isotope analyses measured across a range of predatory and low trophic level co..., More details of data collection are provided in the Ecological Applications Publication \"Shortened food chain length in a fished versus unfished coral reef\" (Young et al., 2024). This work was conducted in the northern line islands in the central Pacific between 2006 and 2009. All samples were collected from Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge (5° 53’ N, 162° 05’W), a US outlying island, and Tabuaeran (3° 51’ N,159 21 W), part of the nation of Kiribati (Fig 1A). These two tropical coral reef atolls are situated in marine regions with similar sea surface temperatures (27.9° C vs 27.5° C respectively) and have a similar coral cover (20.4% and 19.5% respectively, Sandin et al. 2008). Palmyra is largely uninhabited (population of 6 to 25) and as a marine protected area, fishing is almost entirely prohibited within 50 nautical miles. Tabuaeran at the time of this survey had a population density of approximately > 60 humans per kilometer of the reef (2500 total) and allowed both commerc..., , # Shortened food chain length in a fished versus unfished coral reef

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.kprr4xhcg](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.kprr4xhcg)

This dataset compares the trophic position between a lightly fished (Tabuearan) and an unfished (Palmyra) atoll in the Line Islands chain. The bulk of the manuscript focuses on analyses of natural abundance isotopic data from seven species across a range of trophic positions. To better control for shifting baselines compound-specific stable isotope analyses are performed on one species (grey reef shark) across the two islands, using multiple different approaches to estimate trophic position for this species. To highlight the fact that the reefs are otherwise similar we also provide data on reef structure and cover (e.g. % live coral, % algae, rugosity). To highlight the effects that fishing has had on fish communities and the potential for these shifts to explain differences in trophic data, we also provide biomass data on fish communi...