Technical note: Estimating light-use efficiency of benthic habitats using underwater O2 eddy covariance

This datafile contains all data required to recreate figures presented in Attard KM & Glud RN (2020) Technical Note: Estimating light-use efficiency of benthic habitats using underwater O2 eddy covariance. Biogeosciences  https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2020-140 

Paper abstract

Light-use efficiency defines the ability of primary producers to convert sunlight energy to primary production and is computed as the ratio between the gross primary production and the intercepted photosynthetic active radiation. While this measure has been applied broadly within the atmospheric sciences to investigate resource-use efficiency in terrestrial habitats, it remains underused within the aquatic realm. This report provides a conceptual framework to compute hourly and daily light-use efficiency using underwater O₂ eddy covariance, a recent technological development that produces habitat-scale rates of primary production under unaltered in situ conditions. The analysis, tested on two benthic flux datasets, documents that hourly light-use efficiency may approach the maximum theoretical limit of 0.125 O₂ photon^-1 under low light conditions but it decreases rapidly towards the middle of the day and is typically tenfold lower on a 24 h basis. Overall, light-use efficiency provides a useful measure of habitat functioning and facilitates site comparison in time and space.