Sponge volume from repeated surveys in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, before and after the 2017 hurricane season

Prior to the 2017 hurricanes, six shallow (8-15 meter depth) reef sites had been selected from the Virgin Islands Territorial Coral Reef Monitoring Program’s (TCRMP) permanent monitoring sites to study variation in sponge communities - Black Point (BP), Coculus Rock (CR), and Magens Bay (MB), which are in embayments with heavily developed watersheds. Buck Island (BI) and Savana Island (SI) are located near undeveloped offshore cays. Botany Bay (BB) is a nearshore site in a bay with a low level of watershed development.

This dataset represents sponge volume from these repeated surveys before and after the 2017 hurricane season. We used three randomly selected transects out of the six permanently established 10-meter TCRMP transects at each site. The same three transects at each site were re-surveyed repeatedly in August 2016 (pre-hurricanes), December 2017 (10 weeks post-hurricanes), March 2018 (24 weeks post-hurricanes), November 2018 (61 weeks post-hurricanes), and July 2019 (93 weeks post-hurricanes).

2017年飓风灾害发生前，研究团队从维尔京群岛领地珊瑚礁监测计划（Virgin Islands Territorial Coral Reef Monitoring Program，TCRMP）的永久监测点位中，遴选6处水深8-15米的浅海珊瑚礁站点，以探究海绵群落的变异规律。其中黑角点（BP，Black Point）、科库勒斯岩（CR，Coculus Rock）与马根斯湾（MB，Magens Bay）三处站点均位于流域开发程度较高的海湾内；巴克岛（BI，Buck Island）与萨瓦纳岛（SI，Savana Island）两处站点毗邻未开发的近海沙洲；植物湾（BB，Botany Bay）则是一处位于流域开发程度较低海湾的近岸站点。
本数据集收录了2017年飓风季前后多次调查获取的海绵体积数据。每个站点设有6条固定的10米长TCRMP样带，从中随机选取3条开展调查；且每个站点的同3条样带分别于2016年8月（飓风发生前）、2017年12月（飓风后10周）、2018年3月（飓风后24周）、2018年11月（飓风后61周）及2019年7月（飓风后93周）完成了重复调查。