Assessment of heat stress exposure in the wider Caribbean coral reefs through the regional delineation of degree heating week data from 1985-01-01 to 2017-12-31 (NCEI Accession 0205786)

This data package presents a three-decade (1985-2017) assessment of heat stress exposure in the wider Caribbean coral reefs at the ecoregional and local scales.

The main heat stress indicator used was the Degree Heating Weeks (DHW) calculated from daily Sea Surface Temperature "CoralTemp" data from CRW-NOAA available from 1985 to the present and from the maximum monthly mean (MMM) version 3.1 at 5 km of the CRW-NOAA program. Different metrics were calculated based on daily DHW and are available in this dataset:

a) the maximum value of DHW per pixel for the entire time series
b) the frequency of the annual maximum values of DHW ≥ 4 °C-
weeks (a predictor of coral "bleaching risk") per pixel
c) the frequency of the annual maximum values of DHW ≥ 8 °C-
weeks (a predictor of bleach-induced mortality or "mortality risk") per pixel
d) the year in which the maximum of DHW occurred
e) the trend of the annual maximum values of DHW per pixel.

Based on the spatiotemporal annual maximum DHW, a new regionalization of heat stress was performed by cluster analysis with the K-means algorithm through the unsupervised classification, this new regionalization delimits the Caribbean in 8 Heat Stress Regions (HSR). We summarized spatiotemporal daily data to describe the temporal patterns at an ecoregional scale by calculating the descriptive statistics of the regional DHW on a given day. This dataset represents a new baseline and regionalization of heat stress in the wider Caribbean coral reefs that will enhance conservation and planning efforts underway.