Bleaching and environmental data for global coral reef sites from 1998-2017

Dataset: Global Bleaching and Environmental DataThe coral bleaching data were composed of the Reef Check dataset (reefcheck.org), collected by a mixture of professional scientists (56%) and trained and certified citizen-scientists (44%) using a standardized transect protocol. The dataset includes counts of the number of coral colonies showing bleaching (i.e., the percent of reef corals that were recorded as bleached), which was classified as site-wide bleaching. We also examined the prevalence of coral bleaching per coral ecoregion (as defined by Veron et al. 2015). We used the global Coral Reef Temperature Anomaly Database (CoRTAD Version 6) from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (www.nodc.noaa.gov/sog/cortad/) to predict coral bleaching prevalence and intensity across reefs worldwide. All CoRTAD variables were weekly data provided on a grid cell basis, of ~4km resolution, from 1982 to 2017(Sully 2019). For a complete list of measurements, refer to the full dataset description in the supplemental file 'Dataset_description.pdf'. The most current version of this dataset is available at: https://www.bco-dmo.org/dataset/773466NSF Division of Ocean Sciences (NSF OCE) OCE-182939