Full description
In the last 30 years, more than 2,000 research papers have been published on the impact of temperature stress on coral reef organisms. We conducted a review of the literature to objectively examine what is known about the potential for natural adaptation of corals to increased temperatures and the effect sizes of assisted evolution efforts that have been documented to date. To identify relevant studies, we conducted a literature search (January 1st, 1975–October 27, 2022) using the ISI Web Of Science database and search engine with the following strings to identify relevant peer-reviewed publications: Title = coral, Topic = bleach AND adapt, heat AND adapt, temperature AND adapt*, acclimat* AND adapt*, acclimat* AND bleach, acclimat* AND temperature, temperature AND bleach, assisted AND evolution, assist AND gene AND flow, assisted AND migration, gene AND edit, selective AND breed. The initial search returned 2,397 papers that met the above criteria. These papers were examined to assess if the study included the following elements: (1) a heat stress condition under laboratory or field conditions; (2) samples from any life history stage of a coral holobiont (excluding host-tissue extractions that were cultured in the lab, separated from the exoskeleton, or papers based solely on cultures of isolated symbionts or microbes and ignoring the coral holobiont); and (3) data reported for at least one coral species in the order Scleractinia from a tropical environment. A total of 562 publications included all three elements. In some instances, multiple publications were found to report different aspects of the same heat stress experiment, but these were treated as independent experiments given that there was no duplication of data.Included in this collection is the R code for mapping products presented in the publication, which built on the source dataset Marine Ecoregions Of the World (MEOW).
There is also a document were we present exploratory figures to help readers visualize the potential applications of this dataset.
Lineage
Maintenance and Update Frequency: notPlannedNotes
CreditHumanes, A. Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) CORDAP
Scharfenstein, H. AIMS & CORDAP
Bay, L. AIMS
Ortiz, J. C. AIMS
Modified: 18 09 2026
Spatial Coverage And Location
text: westlimit=-178.3603821653151; southlimit=-35.17380831799957; eastlimit=180.2386084188; northlimit=45.336701909968134
Database dictionary - Natural adaptation and assisted evolution of corals to heat stress [pdf file size: 149 KB]
DATABASE Natural adaptation and assisted evolution of corals to heat stress [xlsx file size: 280KB]
Open copy - Database and Dictionary Package - 6 csv files and 1 txt file [zip folder size: 71KB]
Source map link: The Nature Conservancy. (2019) Marine Ecoregions Of the World (MEOW). [dataset] ArcGIS Hub.
url :
https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/903c3ae05b264c00a3b5e58a4561b7e6/about![]()
R code file: MEOW_Mercator.R [size: 2KB]
url :
https://api.aims.gov.au/data-v2.0/03a5693e-d764-48d4-8e9c-211a5d52c13b/files/MEOW_mercator.R![]()
Example figures
- global : 03a5693e-d764-48d4-8e9c-211a5d52c13b
