High-resolution monitoring of Salish Sea estuarine communities through participatory science

Agents of global change, such as climate disruptions, habitat loss, and biological invasions, affect nearshore and intertidal ecological communities in acute and chronic ways. Biological monitoring aims to track the changes in ecological communities over time, yet temporal mismatches between sampling regimes, environmental stressors, and corresponding ecological responses of interest often limit the utility of monitoring data for testing hypotheses related to these changes. Participatory science, alternatively “citizen science”, can increase the geographic and temporal scale of monitoring and can be a tool to address this limitation. By improving statistical power through higher resolution and a larger scale of data, participatory science programs can detect how global change alters highly dynamic ecological communities. In this study, we evaluate insights from a participatory science dataset (Washington Sea Grant Crab Team) on nearshore mobile epifaunal communities in the Salish Sea, h..., , # Data from: High-resolution monitoring of Salish Sea estuarine communities through participatory science

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.0rxwdbsdt](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0rxwdbsdt)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset is a subset of the Washington Sea Grant Crab Team monitoring network dataset compiled specifically to investigate whether pocket estuary mobile epifauna showed changes consistent with the 2021 atmospheric \"Heat Dome\". The Crab Team monitoring network, launched in 2015, was designed for early detection and tracking of invasive European green crab, along with monitoring of all other mobile epifauna observed in baited traps. The monitoring is conducted by trained volunteers and staff at partner agencies.

This dataset consists of species abundance observations aggregated by sample (site by month) for sites within the Salish Sea geography of Washington. Additionally, temperature records for a subset of sampled sites documents water temperature at ...,