Coral bleaching poses a severe threat to the health and survival of global coral reef ecosystems, with recent events surpassing historical heat stress records. To address this crisis, improved long-term monitoring, communication, and coordination are urgently required to enhance conservation, management, and policy responses. This study reviews global coral bleaching survey methodologies and datasets spanning 1963 to 2022, ide...

Warm‐season marine heatwaves (MHWs) have greatly increased in frequency, severity, and extent over the last few decades, driving more frequent and severe coral bleaching episodes. Given the grave near‐term threat to coral reefs imposed by MHWs, it is important to assess the mechanisms by which corals may acquire higher thermal tolerance. Recent field and laboratory studies have demonstrated that exposure to sublethal heat stre...

Projecting the effects of climate change on net reef calcium carbonate production is critical to understanding the future impacts on ecosystem function, but prior estimates have not included corals' natural adaptive capacity to such change. Here we estimate how the ability of symbionts to evolve tolerance to heat stress, or for coral hosts to shuffle to favourable symbionts, and their combination, may influence responses to th...

Scientists and managers rely on indicator taxa such as coral and macroalgal cover to evaluate the effects of human disturbance on coral reefs, often assuming a universally positive relationship between local human disturbance and macroalgae. Despite evidence that macroalgae respond to local stressors in diverse ways, there have been few efforts to evaluate relationships between specific macroalgae taxa and local human‐driven d...

Climate change and warming ocean temperatures are a threat to coral reef ecosystems. Since the 1980s, there has been an increase in mass coral bleaching and associated coral mortality due to more frequent and severe thermal stress. Although most research has focused on the role of temperature, coral bleaching is a product of the interacting effects of temperature and other environmental variables such as solar radiation. High...

For many ecosystem services, it remains uncertain whether the impacts of climate change will be mostly negative or positive and how these changes will be geographically distributed. These unknowns hamper the identification of regional winners and losers, which can influence debate over climate policy. Here, we use coral reefs to explore the spatial variability of climate stress by modelling the ecological impacts of rising sea...

Climate warming threatens to increase mass coral bleaching events, and several studies have projected the demise of tropical coral reefs this century. However, recent evidence indicates corals may be able to respond to thermal stress though adaptive processes (e.g., genetic adaptation, acclimatization, and symbiont shuffling). How these mechanisms might influence warming‐induced bleaching remains largely unknown. This study co...

The intensification of agriculture in the central U.S. is commonly cited as the primary cause of the increase in nitrogen (N) flux by the Mississippi River since the 1950s and the development of seasonal bottom‐water hypoxia in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Over the past two decades, however, agricultural land use and land cover have remained relatively constant. With high N inputs each year, climate variability could now be co...

Elevated ocean temperatures can cause coral bleaching, the loss of colour from reef‐building corals because of a breakdown of the symbiosis with the dinoflagellate Symbiodinium . Recent studies have warned that global climate change could increase the frequency of coral bleaching and threaten the long‐term viability of coral reefs. These assertions are based on projecting the coarse output from atmosphere–ocean general circula...