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.