We measured the emission lines in the spaxel spectra of MaNGA galaxies in
order to determine the abundance distributions therein. It has been suggested
that the strength of the low-ionization lines, R_2, N_2, and S_2 may be
increased (relative to Balmer lines) in (some) spaxel spectra of the MaNGA
survey due to a contribution of the radiation of the diffuse ionized gas.
Consequently, the abundances derived from the spaxel spectra through
strong-line methods may suffer from large errors. We examined this expectation
by comparing the behaviour of the line intensities and the abundances estimated
through different calibrations for slit spectra of HII regions in nearby
galaxies, for fibre spectra from the SDSS, and for spaxel spectra of the MaNGA
survey. We found that the S_2 strength is increased significantly in the fibre
and spaxel spectra. The mean enhancement changes with metallicity and can be as
large as a factor of 2. The mean distortion of R_2 and N_2 is less than a
factor of 1.3. This suggests that Kaufmann et al.'s demarcation line between
AGNs and HII regions in the BPT diagram is a useful criterion to reject spectra
with significantly distorted strengths of the N_2 and R_2 lines. We find that
the three-dimensional R calibration, which uses the N_2 and R_2 lines, produces
reliable abundances in the MaNGA galaxies. The one-dimensional N2 calibration
produces either reliable or wrong abundances depending on whether excitation
and N/O abundance ratio in the target region (spaxel) are close to or differ
from those parameters in the calibrating points located close to the
calibration relation. We then determined abundance distributions within the
optical radii in the discs of 47 MaNGA galaxies. The optical radii of the
galaxies were estimated from the surface brightness profiles constructed based
on the MaNGA observations.Comment: 19 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in A&
