Data from: Establishing legal and benthic baselines of Taiwan's coral ecosystems to inform effective conservation

This dataset supports the analyses presented in Ribas-Deulofeu et al. (under review), Establishing legal and benthic baselines of Taiwan's coral ecosystems to inform effective conservation (under review in Regional Studies in Marine Science). The dataset contains benthic community composition data collected across eight geographic regions of Taiwan between 2016 and 2023, along with environmental parameters (sea surface temperature, photosynthetically available radiation) and location-level metadata including Marine Protected Area (MPA) status and protection level. Benthic data are provided at two levels of taxonomic and functional resolution: major categories and morpho-functional groups. The dataset also supports analyses of the legal framework regulating MPAs in Taiwan. A fully documented R script (taiwan_baselines.Rmd and taiwan_baselines.R) is provided to reproduce all statistical analyses and figures presented in the manuscript. Data are provided as CSV files and GeoTIFF rasters.