Sr/Ca and Linear Extension Data for Five Modern O. faveolata Colonies from Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida, USA

Strontium/Calcium (Sr/Ca) ratios act as a proxy for sea surface temperature (SST) in the skeletons of aragonite producing organisms, such as massive corals. The Sr/Ca-SST proxy shows promise when applied to single Orbicella faveolata colonies in the Atlantic/Caribbean regions, but it is currently unknown how well the Sr/Ca-SST proxy performs between colonies of this species. It is necessary to understand how well coral colonies from the same location replicate in order to examine and quantify uncertainty introduced from potential sample collection or subsampling errors. In order to examine both intra and intercolony Sr/Ca variability in O. faveolata, five live-top colonies were collected from the Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida, USA, in 2008 and 2012 and analyzed for Sr/Ca using inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES). The Sr/Ca sub-annual cycles were then used to compute annual linear extension rates for each individual colony by measuring the distance between summer Sr/Ca peaks.

For further information regarding data collection and/or processing methods refer to:
Flannery, J.F., Richey, J.N., Toth, L.T., Kuffner, I.B., and Poore, R.Z., 2018, Quantifying uncertainty in Sr/Ca-based estimates of SST from the coral Orbicella faveolata: Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, v. 33, no. 9, p. 958-973, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018PA003389.