Colony-level coral demographic data from Japan & Australia (2016-2019)

The persistent exposure of coral communities to more variable abiotic
regimes is assumed to augment their resilience to future climatic
variability. Yet, while the determinants of coral population resilience
across species remain unknown, we are unable to predict the winners and
losers across reef ecosystems exposed to increasingly variable conditions.
Using annual surveys of 3171 coral individuals across Australia and Japan
(2016-2019), we explored spatial variation across the short- and long-term
dynamics of competitive, stress-tolerant, and weedy assemblages to
evaluate how thermal variability mediates the structural composition of
coral communities. Here this dataset contains the raw colony-level data
collected during these annual surveys, detailing the size, survival, and
recruitment of coral colonies within a series of permenant plots arranged
throughout the reef communities of Okinawa, Kochi (both Japan), the
Solitary Islands Marine Park, and Heron Island (both Australia). This data
set facilitates the comparison of coral population dynamics between
tropical and subtropical ecoregions and between different taxonomic and
morpho-functional groups.