Modelled projections of coral species presences/absences at reef locations worldwide, under warming and acidification

Global projection of coral species with suitable/non-suitable habitat at coral reef locations around the world until the end of the century, derived from environmental niche modelling. The projections are decadal, for the "training" period (circa 1990s) and for every decade from 2020s to 2080s, under two different emission scenarios: the Shared Socio-economic Pathways "SSP1-2.6" and "SSP5-8.5" (see Meinshausen et al., 2020 for details). The data is provided as two separate csv files (which have been added to a .zip file due to the large file sizes), each corresponding to one emission scenario.
The data is based on the output of individual Maximum Entropy models (MaxEnt; Phillips, Anderson, & Schapire, 2006) for 684 Scleractinian coral species. Each model was trained to capture the environmental requirements of individual coral species, with variables such as Sea Surface Temperature (SST), aragonite saturation, salinity, nutrient levels, photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) levels, attenuation coefficient at a wavelength of 490 nanometers, light penetration depth and dust. For many of these, annual averages were considered alongside monthly extremes and other measures of inter-annual variability.

Once the models were trained, they were used to study future habitat suitability within a species-specific study area, reflecting the current range of the species and the areas it could potentially reach as larvae carried by ocean currents. Future SST, salinity and aragonite saturation values were based on model output from the UK Earth System Model version 1 (UKESM1; Sellar et al., 2019), a next-generation Earth System Model developed jointly by the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Met Office.

These datasets were produced for the study in the article "Paris Agreement could prevent regional mass extinctions of coral species", by Elena Couce, Benjamin Cowburn, David Clare and Joanna K. Bluemel, Global Change Biology (2023; https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16690). See also the R code and associated dataset available at CefasRepRes/Training_MaxEnt_model_for_a_coral_species_with_connectivity (github.com; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7788469)