This dataset contains nitrogen and phosphorus excretion rate, as well as dry biomass, estimates for individual vertebrate and invertebrate animals in marine and estuarine environments. This dataset is a product of an LTER Synthesis Working Group aimed at evaluating the spatiotemporal variability in consumer nutrient dynamics in the wake of global change across eight long-term ecological research projects. These projects include seven long-term ecological research programs (LTER) funded by the National Science Foundation: (1) California Current Ecosystem, (2) Florida Coastal Everglades, (3) Moorea Coral Reef, (4) Northern Gulf of Alaska, (5) Plum Island Ecosystems, (6) Santa Barbara Coastal, and (7) Virginia Coast Reserve LTER projects. Additionally, the dataset includes data from (8) The Partnership for Interdisciplinary Science of Coastal Oceans (PISCO) research program. The temporal coverage of each time series data varies among projects, with the earliest record in 1999 and the most recent in 2023.
This data package also includes five R scripts used for data harmonization, identical to those in the Initial Release of the LTER Synthesis Working Group: Consumer-Mediated Nutrient Dynamics Project, v1.0.0. You can find the release in GitHub here: https://github.com/lter/lterwg-marine-cnd/releases/tag/v1.0.0.