Water temperature data from Subsurface Temperature Recorders (STRs) deployed at coral reef sites in Timor-Leste from 2012 to 2014

Water temperature data were collected by the NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP) using subsurface temperature recorders (STRs) deployed at fixed climate survey sites located on hard bottom shallow water (< 30 m) habitats in Timor-Leste. Climate sites were established by CREP to establish ecological baselines for climate change by measuring multiple features of the coral reef environment (in addition to the data described herein) over time.

These STRs or high-accuracy temperature loggers made by SeaBird Electronics (SBE) were deployed on the reef for a period of 2 years from October 2012 to October 2014, and the sample interval was set to one hour.

STRs aid in the monitoring of seawater temperature variability. These water temperature time series data for Timor-Leste, along with other data collected at the climate survey sites (water chemistry, calcification rates, invertebrate biodiversity, and benthic cover, all archived separately), can be used to help scientists assess and understand how coral reefs are responding to thermal stress that can lead to coral bleaching. The temperature data can be accessed online via the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Ocean Archive.

In 2011, NOAA and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Timor-Leste Mission formed a 5-year bi-lateral partnership agreement from 2012 to 2016, in support of the Government of Timor-Leste—particularly the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF)—by addressing significant information gaps in their nearshore marine ecosystems. Specifically, MAF asked NOAA to address the following questions:

1.Where are the nearshore marine resources?

2.What are the nearshore marine resources?

3.How are they changing over time and what threats are potentially causing these changes?

4.What approaches are needed to manage and conserve the nearshore marine resources?

With financial support from USAID and in-kind support from the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP), the NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP) conducted baseline ecosystem assessment surveys to inform ecosystem-based management planning in Timor-Leste. The primary activities conducted by NOAA to answer these questions included:

1.satellite mapping of nearshore habitats,

2.conducting coral reef ecosystem assessments,

3.establishing ecological baselines for climate change, and

4.building management capacity by developing a spatial data framework

The temperature data described herein resulted from the third activity to establish ecological baselines for climate change.

Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center. 2017. Interdisciplinary baseline ecosystem assessment surveys to inform ecosystem-based management planning in Timor-Leste: Final Report. Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, PIFSC Special Publication, SP-17-002, 234 p. https://doi.org/10.7289/V5/SP-PIFSC-17-002.

As the survey methods described and used herein are also implemented as part of the NOAA Pacific Reef Assessment and Monitoring Program (Pacific RAMP)—an ecosystem-scale interdisciplinary coral reef monitoring program—the data from Timor-Leste are directly comparable to and informed by data collected by NOAA-CREP throughout the U.S. Pacific Islands and Territories. Furthermore, the methods used for establishing ecological baselines for climate change in Timor-Leste (Chapter 4) are being adopted and implemented at 21 sites across eight member states of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission within the Western Pacific (WESTPAC) region. These data provide a foundation for comparing the ecological baselines under current and future stresses associated with climate change in the Coral Triangle region.

Data fields include metadata (region, location, site tag, site ID, depth, coordinates, deploy and recovery mission, deployment and recovery date), instrument information (type, manufacturer, model, serial number), and temperature observations (temperature in degrees Celsius, date, year, month, day, and hour of observation, and date range of time series)

While every effort has been made to ensure that these data are accurate and reliable within the limits of the current state of the art, NOAA cannot assume liability for any damages caused by errors or omissions in the data, nor as a result of the failure of the data to function on a particular system. NOAA makes no warranty, expressed or implied, nor does the fact of distribution constitute such a warranty.

Timor-Leste

Not applicable

Not applicable

NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP) Data Sharing Recommendations, version 9.0 updated August 12, 2015:

CREP welcomes the opportunity to collaborate on research issues contributing to the scientific basis for better management of marine ecosystems. CREP has a very diverse set of field activities that generates large volumes of data using an array of data collection protocols.

The following recommendations are for your consideration as you use this data:

1) Data analyses should take all field exigencies into account. The most effective way to do this would be active collaboration with CREP principal investigators.

2) In all presentations, product releases, or publications using data generated by CREP, proper acknowledgement of both CREP and the individuals responsible for data collection is expected. Citing the DOI (if available) is preferred, a non-DOI example is listed below.

3) If you collect or generate data for the same study areas, CREP requests that you share relevant information on complimentary data collections.

4) Those receiving data are strongly urged to inform the CREP Data Management Team of any errors and discrepancies that are discovered during the course of using these data. They are further urged to bring to the attention of the Team all problems and difficulties encountered in using these data. This information is necessary in order to improve the collections and to facilitate more efficient and economical data processing and retrieval. The users are asked to supply copies of any missing data that may be located, and to provide information as to significant subsets and special aggregations of data that are developed in using the material provided.

Example acknowledgment:

"This publication makes use of data products gathered by the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP), Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center (PIFSC), National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with funding support from the United States Agency for International Development. The analysis and interpretations presented here are solely that of the current authors.”

Data can be accessed online via the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Ocean Archive.

None

These oceanographic data are PRELIMINARY data and have not been screened for accuracy. NOAA can not be held liable for use of these data in a manner other than for perusal of preliminary oceanographic data for scientific research on coral reefs ecosystems.

Please cite NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Program (CREP) when using the data.

Suggested citation:

Coral Reef Ecosystem Program; Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center (2017). Water temperature data from Subsurface Temperature Recorders (STRs) deployed at coral reef sites in Timor-Leste from 2012 to 2014. NOAA's National Center for Environmental Information, https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/inport/item/46164.

None

None

Raw data are downloaded from an STR using the SeaBird Electronics SeaTerm software program and saved as .ASC files. The data are quality controlled using MatLab, and the files are saved as .CDP files and then migrated into the Oracle database. PIFSC Oracle database view: MV_OCN_STR_TIMESERIES

All NULL temperature values are included to bridge data gaps in order to complete the time series.

INSTRUMENT SPECIFICATIONS:

Temperature (degrees Celsius): Measurement Range 21-32; Initial Accuracy +/-0.002, Typical Stability 0.0002 per month, Resolution 0.0001.

Clock Accuracy: 5 seconds per month.

Subsurface temperature recorders were deployed in 2012 at 10 sites in Timor-Leste; however, STRs were only recovered from 8 of the 10 sites in 2014.

All data gathered are conceptually consistent with the given methodology.

The data is quality controlled by CREP personnel after the data is downloaded from the instrument, and again by CREP data management when the data are migrated to the Oracle database.

The data is captured in several locations: files stored on a laptop and backed up to an external drive by the user during the mission, and on the PIFSC network post mission before the data are imported into the PIFSC Oracle database. The PIFSC network and Oracle database are maintained and regularly backed up by PIFSC ITS.

Water temperature data are collected using high-accuracy subsurface temperature recorders (STRs) made by SeaBird Electronics (model SBE 39). STRs were deployed on the reef for a period of 2 years at depths ranging from 4-25m at climate sites in Timor-Leste. At a few sites, multiple STRs were deployed along a depth transect (shallow, mid, and deep water depth between 4 and 25 m).