Impacts of climate change on organisms in the Mediterranean Sea [Dataset]

This dataset compiles narrative and quantitative evidences of impacts of warming on organisms living in the Mediterranean Sea published in the literature until year 2014 as well as sea surface temperature values. The search of evidences of impact was conducted using ISI Web of Knowledge and the keywords “ (Mediterranean) AND ((Bio* OR Eco*)) AND ((warming OR temperature)) AND ((Marine OR Ocean*)) NOT ((paleo*))”. Only evidences from articles directly attributing the changes observed in marine biota to warming are included in the dataset. The dataset comprises biological impacts observed after single warming events as well as during longer-term observations. The dataset provides information about the study conducted (i.e. year or period of years of the study, site name and geographical coordinates, spatial scale of the study, species name, taxonomic group, whether the species is sessile or mobile, native or introduced), the type, magnitude and activation energy (Brown et al. 2004) of biological responses. The values on sea surface temperature (SST) are derived from satellite images. SST is calculated as the mean august SST (SSTaugust) and as the 99th percentile of SST (SST99p) in the year and location the impact was recorded. The SST anomaly is calculated as the SST99p with respect to the averaged august temperature computed for the period 1960-1985. The calculations to estimate activation energy and detailed information about the sources of SST data are described in Marbà et al. (submitted). Access and reuse: The database is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike International licence 4.0. Contact person for enquiries: Núria Marbà ([e-mail]).