From Australian Oceans Data Network
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Natural adaptation and assisted evolution of corals to heat stress

Created 23/06/2025

Updated 23/06/2025

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In the last 30 years, more than 2,000 research papers have been published on the impact of temperature stress on coral reef organisms. We conducted a systematic review of the literature to objectively examine what is known about the potential for natural adaptation of corals to increased temperatures and the effect sizes of assisted evolution efforts that have been documented to date. To identify relevant studies, we conducted a literature search (October 27, 2022) using the ISI Web Of Science database and search engine with the following strings to identify relevant peer-reviewed publications: Title = coral, Topic = bleach AND adapt, heat AND adapt, temperature AND adapt, acclimat AND adapt, acclimat AND bleach, acclimat* AND temperature, temperature AND bleach, assisted AND evolution, assist AND gene AND flow, assisted AND migration, gene AND edit, selective AND breed. The initial search returned 2,397 papers that met the above criteria. These papers were examined to assess if the study included the following elements: (1) a heat stress condition under laboratory or field conditions, (2) samples from any life history stage of a coral holobiont (excluding host-tissue extractions that were cultured in the lab, separated from the exoskeleton, or papers based solely on cultures of isolated symbionts or microbes and ignoring the coral holobiont), and (3) data reported for at least one coral species in the order Scleractinia from a tropical environment. In the end, 562 publications included all three elements. In some instances, multiple publications were found to report different aspects of the same heat stress experiment, but these were treated as independent experiments given that there was no duplication of data. Included in this collection is the R code for mapping products presented in the publication, which built on the source dataset Marine Ecoregions Of the World (MEOW).

Files and APIs

Additional Info

Field Value
Title Natural adaptation and assisted evolution of corals to heat stress
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/5cb00483-1f65-4a9d-bcc0-13e5b90b6df5
Contact Point
Australian Ocean Data Network
reception@aims.gov.au
Reference Period 24/08/2023
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
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      ],
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  "type": "Polygon"
}
Data Portal Australian Oceans Data Network

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Australian Oceans Data Network "Natural adaptation and assisted evolution of corals to heat stress". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://catalogue.aodn.org.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/natural-adaptation-and-assisted-evolution-of-corals-to-heat-stress