Systematic review of the uncertainty of coral reef futures under climate change, datasets

Climate change impact syntheses, such as those by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), consistently assert that limiting global warming to 1.5°C is unlikely to safeguard most of the world’s coral reefs. This prognosis primarily stems from 'excess heat’ threshold models, which assume that widespread coral bleaching predictably occurs when temperatures accumulate beyond a specific threshold. Our systematic review of research projecting coral reef futures to climate change (n=79) revealed that 'excess heat' models constituted only one third (32%) of all studies but attracted a high proportion (68%) of citations in the field. We observed that most methods employed deterministic cause-and-effect rules rather than probabilistic relationships, impeding the field's ability to estimate uncertainties of coral reef futures. In attempting to assess the consistency of projected impacts, we aimed to identify common coral reef metrics under the same emissions scenarios. However, dispa..., We conducted a comprehensive literature search using the Thomson Reuters Web of Science database to identify studies that projecting the impacts of climate change on shallow tropical and sub-tropical coral reefs. This search, adhering to PRISMA guidelines, yielded 2705 peer-reviewed articles, which we refined to 79 relevant articles published between 1999 and 2023 based on a specific selection criteria (Dataset 1). These studies were categorized into five major methodology types and further classified based on their approaches to simulating heat stress. Key characteristics such as the model output variables, spatial scale, and geographic area of each study were extracted, along with their methodological approaches, assumptions, and the techniques used.Our study aimed to assess and compare the projected impacts and uncertainties of various model types using a meta-analysis approach. The database of 79 studies was considered for inclusion in the exploratory meta-analysis based on specific..., , # Systematic review of the uncertainty of coral reef futures under climate change, datasets

Published paper resulting from this data can be found at:

## Summary

This study conducted a systematic review of 79 published articles projecting coral reef responses to future climate change. This dataset contains qualitative and quantitative data extracted from the published studies, including model types, geographic focus, and projected impacts on coral reefs.

## Description of the data and file structure

### Supplementary Data File

**Extracted Data**: **Source data for effect size calculations (n=8 published studies).**

* Short.reference used to identify the published study from which the data were extracted. See Full Reference List within this Read.Me file
* Scenario.ID identifies the individual scenario within each published study, numbered sequentially as scenario 1 (S1), scenario 2 (S2)
* N.c is n/number of model runs for control scenario
* N.e is n/number of model runs fo...