Coral reef state influences resilience to acute climate-mediated disturbances

Aim: Understand the interplay between resistance and recovery on coral reefs, and investigate dependence on pre- and post-disturbance states, to inform generalisable reef resilience theory across large spatial and temporal scales.

Location: Tropical coral reefs globally.

Time period: 1966 to 2017.

Major taxa studied: Scleratinian hard corals.

Methods: We conducted a literature search to compile a global dataset of total coral cover before and after acute storms, temperature stress, and coastal runoff from flooding events. We used meta-regression to identify variables that explained significant variation in disturbance impact, including disturbance type, year, depth, and pre-disturbance coral cover. We further investigated the influence of these same variables, as well as post-disturbance coral cover and disturbance impact, on recovery rate. We examined the shape of recovery, assigning qualitatively distinct, ecologically relevant, population growth trajectories: linear, logistic, logarithmic (decelerating), and a second-order quadratic (accelerating).

Results: We analysed 427 disturbance impacts and 117 recovery trajectories. Accelerating and logistic were the most common recovery shapes, underscoring non-linearities and recovery lags. A complex but meaningful relationship between the state of a reef pre- and post-disturbance, disturbance impact magnitude, and recovery rate was identified. Fastest recovery rates were predicted for intermediate to large disturbance impacts, but a decline in this rate was predicted when more than ~75% of pre-disturbance cover was lost. We identified a shifting baseline, with declines in both pre-and post-disturbance coral cover over the 50 year study period.

Main conclusions: We breakdown the complexities of coral resilience, showing interplay between resistance and recovery, as well as dependence on both pre- and post-disturbance states, alongside documenting a chronic decline in these states. This has implications for predicting coral reef futures and implementing actions to enhance resilience.

Methods
The dataset provides a summary of all studies included in the analysis and the key statistics obtained from the studies and used in the analyses for the manuscript entitled "Coral reef state influences resilience to acute climate-mediated disturbances" as published in Global Ecology and Biogeography. The dataset includes details about the publication, spatial identifiers (e.g. realm, province, ecoregion) unique site code, information on the disturbance type and timing, the pre-and post-disturbance coral cover, the 5-year annual recovery rate, the recovery shape and recovery completeness classifications.

Please see details Methods in the journal article "Coral reef state influences resilience to acute climate-mediated disturbances" as published in Global Ecology and Biogeography.