Global warming impairs stock-recruitment dynamics of corals

Brief description

This dataset supports the 2019 Nature publication by Terry Hughes and 16 co-authors, entitled "Global warming impairs stock-recruitment dynamics of corals". It is comprised of three separate Excel files:

(1) Reef Summary - which lists all survey reefs and the years in which they were surveyed

(2) Recruitment Data - which gives counts of spawners, brooders and totals for individual panels across all survey sites, reefs and time periods

(3) Coral Reproductive Condition - which gives per cent gravid data and sample sizes for Acropora corals on assessed reefs

Full description

This dataset supports the 2019 Nature publication by Terry Hughes and 16 co-authors, entitled "Global warming impairs stock-recruitment dynamics of corals". It is comprised of three separate Excel files:

(1) Reef Summary

The data supporting this publication was collected between 1996 and 2018 (although it should be noted that the spawning period occurred at the end of the preceding year). This is a summary file that lists which years a given reef was surveyed i.e. had recruitment panels installed during the preceding spawning season.

(2) Recruitment Data

This is the main dataset. The dataset contains the following information:

Year - the year following the spawning event, i.e. when recruitment panels were retrieved and counted. We have chosen this nomenclature because disturbance events tend to occur in the early part of the year (in Austral Summer), and their impact affects recruitment in the latter part of the year, when panels are deployed. For example, panels retrieved in 2016 preceded the first bout of bleaching in March 2016, the 2017 panels were deployed and retrieved after one bleaching episode, and the 2018 recruitment was preceded by both bleaching events.

Period - denotes if the year falls either before or after the mass coral bleaching event in 2016.

Sector - the Great Barrier Reef has been divided in to five latitudinal sectors, these can be seen in Figure 1b on the manuscript

Reef - reef name

ReefID - unique reef identifier

Site - site number or name

Panel - number of panel deployed

Spawn/Brood/Total - the count of spawner and brooder recruits on each retrieved panel, along with their sum (Total)

(3) Coral Reproductive Condition

Staghorn Acropora colonies were sampled when recruitment tiles were deployed in two years, 1995 (for 1996 retrieval) and 2017 (for 2018 retrieval) on 10 reefs along the Great Barrier Reef. The percentage of colonies that were gravid (had oocytes clearly ready to spawn) was calculated from the sample for each reef. The sample size collected is also provided