Dataset: Summary data from the Heatwaves and Coral-Recovery Database (HeatCRD) covering global coral reef sites from 1977-2020

Data were collected from 160 data sources including data from established monitoring programs and new data extracted from the literature. To date, we have coral data for 12,266 sites, from 83 countries, from 1977 to 2020. Coral-cover data were extracted from the primary literature using WebPlotDigitizer version 4.6 (Marin, 2017). Sampling points that fell on land or were > 1 km from any coral reef were removed. If sites were not named or given explicit coordinates, the coordinates were estimated and a comment was added to the data table. The coordinates were entered into Google Earth and the location names, distance to land in meters, and exposure were determined and recorded for each site. Exposure to waves was based on a site’s potential exposure to predominant winds, swell, and fetch (i.e., the extent of open ocean). Mean turbidity (Kd490) was added for each site (Sully and Woesik, (2020)). The Marine Ecoregions of the World (MEOW) shapefiles (Spalding et al., 2007) and IUCN’s (International Union for Conservation of Nature) World Database on Protected Areas (2022) were used to determine in which marine realm and protected area each site was located. Veron et al. (2015)'s ecoregions shapefiles were used to determine the ecoregion of each site. Data on the types of reef habitats were extracted from the Allen Coral Atlas (Lyons et al., 2022). The Coral Reef Temperature Anomaly Database (CoRTAD version 6; Saha et al., 2018), which is a collection of sea surface temperature variables, was used to extract temperature metrics for each sampling event (Sully et al., 2019). CoRTAD values were only extracted for a sampling event if sampled data had a clearly defined month and year — where sampling events were missing a date, the 15th day of the month was used. For any data given as a range (i.e., depth or date), the midpoint was taken and a comment was added to the HeatCRD.

See van Woesik and Kratochwill (2024) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03221-3 for more information.