Coral community tropicalisation tracks recent climate warming

Data and code required for community distribution modelling from the paper: Coral community tropicalisation tracks recent climate warming. Abstract:Climate-driven shifts in species ranges are transforming ecosystems worldwide, yet the timing of these transformations remains unclear. Here, we show that the tropicalisation of subtropical and temperate reefs in Japan, defined by the replacement of temperate habitat-forming taxa with coral-dominated communities, has emerged only within the past three decades. We explore the likely onset of tropicalisation with analyses of 643 sites spanning a ~1950 km latitudinal gradient over 90 years, encompassing 57 scleractinian coral genera, based on statistical community assembly models that incorporate occurrences of genera, their traits, and environmental drivers. We find pronounced long-term shifts in both taxonomic composition and trait profiles over the past nine decades, driven primarily by rising sea temperatures. We show the poleward migration of highly diverse branching and tabular coral genera that characterise tropical assemblages in the past 30 years, whilst subtropical and temperate coral taxa have retreated. These results show that the poleward expansion of tropical coral communities is a recent, climate-forced phenomenon, tightly coupled to the trajectory of ocean warming that signals the emergence of novel reef ecosystems in temperate regions.