Microbiome Host Bleaching and Mortality Data for coral hosts collected in Moorea, French Polynesia from Jul 2018 to Aug 2020

This dataset contains bleaching and mortality levels for the coral hosts associated with the 16S rRNA gene V4 region amplicon sequencing data, NCBI SRA accession from BioProject PRJNA994532. Orthorectified photomosaics were assembled from photos taken of experimental plots from an in situ coral manipulative experiment in Moorea, French Polynesia between 2018-2020. Partial bleaching and mortality was assigned from these photomosaics to Acropora retusa, Porites lobata, and Pocillopora spp. coral colonies associated with the microbiome sampling described above, whenever possible. Data collection was a multi-university collaborative effort between the Vega Thurber Laboratory, at Oregon State University during the time of the experiment, and the Burkepile Community Ecology Laboratory at UC Santa Barbara.

The experiment, conducted on the fore reef on the north shore of the island, evaluated the interaction of consumer pressure level (termed "Herbivory" in the dataset and in Vompe et al., 2023) and nutrient enrichment on coral microbiome composition and host bleaching and mortality. The experiment also captured two severe and sequential marine heatwaves in 2019 and 2020. This experiment aimed to evaluate whether managing local inputs, including water column nutrient levels and fishing regimes, interacts with heat stress to affect coral success. Coral colony partial bleaching and partial mortality data were collected for hosts sampled for microbiome analyses, because we aimed to correlate microbiome changes to changes in host phenotypes.