the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Coral Skeletal Proxy Records Database for the Great Barrier Reef, Australia
Abstract. The Great Barrier Reef (GBR), Australia has a long history of palaeoenvironmental coral research. However, it can be logistically difficult to find the relevant research and records, which are often unpublished or exist as ‘grey literature’. This hinders researchers’ ability to efficiently assess the current state of coral core studies on the GBR and thus identify any key knowledge gaps. This study presents the Great Barrier Reef Coral Skeletal Records Database (GBRCD), which compiles 208 records from coral skeletal research conducted since the early 1990s. The database includes records from the Holocene, from ~8,000 years ago, to the present day; from the northern, central, and southern GBR from inshore and offshore locations. Massive Porites spp. coral records comprise the majority (92.5 %) of the database, and the remaining records are from Acropora, Isopora or Cyphastrea spp. The database includes 78 variables, with Sr/Ca, U/Ca and Ba/Ca the most frequently measured. Most records measure data over 10 or more years and are at monthly or lower resolution. The GBRCD is machine readable and easily searchable so users can find records relevant to their research, for example, by filtering for site names, time period, or coral type. It is publicly available as comma-separated values (CSV) data and metadata files with entries linked by the unique record ID and as Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) files. The GBRCD is publicly available from the NOAA National Center for Environmental Information’s Paleoclimate Data Archive at https://doi.org/10.25921/hqxk-8h74 (Arzey et al. 2024). The collection and curation of existing GBR coral research provides researchers with the ability to analyse common proxies such as Sr/Ca across multiple locations and/or examine regional to reef scale trends. The database is also suitable for multi-proxy comparisons and combination or composite analyses to determine overarching changes recorded by the proxies. This database represents the first comprehensive compilation of coral records from the GBR. It enables the investigation of multiple environmental factors via various proxy systems for the GBR, northeastern Australia and potentially the broader Indo-Pacific.
- Preprint
(3964 KB) - Metadata XML
- BibTeX
- EndNote
Status: open (until 28 Jun 2024)
-
RC1: 'Comment on essd-2024-159', Niels de Winter, 21 May 2024
reply
Dear Sebastiaan van de Velde, dear authors,
As requested, I read and reviewed the manuscript titled “Coral Skeletal Proxy Records Database for the Great Barrier Reef, Australia” submitted by Ariella Arzey and colleagues for publication in Earth System Science Data. In their manuscript, the authors present and discuss the new online Great Barrier Reef Coral Skeletal Records Database (GBRCD) which compiles a large quantity of data gathered in studies into skeletal coral records in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The main aim of this study, and the database, is to compile this proxy data from various sources to make it available and machine readable for future research projects. Given the wide distribution of this type of data in different formats and in various repositories and supplements, this database presents an important effort to making the hard work of coral researchers more easily available for meta-analyses and comparison studies.
The authors provide a clear introduction explaining the need for a comprehensive database of coral records in the Great Barrier Reef and a thoughtful background section on the reef setting and the types of proxies contained in the dataset. A small point of feedback would be that it is not immediately clear that this is an open dataset and that more data can be added. However, this becomes clear at the end of the manuscript. The two formats of the database (LiPd + CSV) ensure ease of access of all the data both through manual downloading and data processing and by machine reading. Figures 3-5 give a nice sneak peek into the spread and location of geochemical records in GBR.
In conclusion, I believe this manuscript and the database it presents represent a valuable contribution to the field of (coral) sclerochronology and paleoclimatology and I would be happy to support its publication more or less as is. Below, I detail a few minor textual comments I had while reading through the manuscript, but beside these I think the manuscript is in pretty good shape.
Minor comments
Line 152: “The GBRCD is along the lines of” should probably be rephrased to something like “The aim of the GBRCD is similar to”
Line 157: The past tense in this criterion and others suggests that the database is done and not a living product. Perhaps this can be rephrased.
Line 208: It is unclear to me how a Mg/Ca ratio can have a value <0, since it is a ratio of two concentrations. Perhaps the authors can use another example of “abnormal data”.
Best wishes,
Niels de Winter
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2024-159-RC1
Data sets
The Great Barrier Reef Coral Skeletal Records Database (GBRCD) A. K. Arzey et al. https://doi.org/10.25921/hqxk-8h74
Interactive computing environment
GBR-Coral-Skeletal-Records-Database Github Repository A. K. Arzey and H. W. Fahey https://github.com/arzeyak/GBR-Coral-Skeletal-Records-Database
Viewed
HTML | XML | Total | BibTeX | EndNote | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
165 | 51 | 8 | 224 | 5 | 6 |
- HTML: 165
- PDF: 51
- XML: 8
- Total: 224
- BibTeX: 5
- EndNote: 6
Viewed (geographical distribution)
Country | # | Views | % |
---|
Total: | 0 |
HTML: | 0 |
PDF: | 0 |
XML: | 0 |
- 1