Data for: Bed-scale impact and recovery of a commercially important intertidal seaweed ...

• Main Authors: Johnston, Elliot, Mittelstaedt, Hannah, Braun, Laura, Muhlin, Jessica, Olsen, Brian, Webber, Hannah, Klemmer, Amanda
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2022
• Subjects: FOS Biological sciences; harvest data; R Code; BACI; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.gmsbcc2s8; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.gmsbcc2s8

As the value of ecosystem-based management (EBM) approaches is increasingly recognized in marine ecosystems, it is critical that the impacts of resource harvest are assessed at various spatial scales. This is particularly true for habitat-forming resources, such as wild seaweeds, that act as foundation species by physically structuring ecosystems. The impacts of spatially heterogeneous harvest may change with scale and have different management implications based on the ecosystem process or organism under consideration. Ascophyllum nodosum (hereafter rockweed) is a canopy-forming fucoid seaweed endemic to rocky coastlines in the North Atlantic Ocean that has been harvested for centuries. We conducted a Before-After Control-Impact study of commercial rockweed harvest at 38 sites across the coast of Maine (USA) from 2018 to 2020 in an effort to understand impact and one-year recovery of two rockweed bed structural characteristics, height and biomass, at a scale similar to a single harvest event. Our results ... : All data were collected in the field between 2018 and 2020 in Maine (USA). All datasets were cleaned and organized in program R. ...