Coral reef resilience and social vulnerability to climate change in the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands (NCEI Accession 0211010)

This dataset results from an analysis of climate exposure, ecological resilience, and social vulnerability to climate change threats for the coral reefs of the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands. Standard methodologies were applied to assess ecological resilience and social vulnerability of communities surveyed by the NOAA National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) in the Pacific. The analysis focuses primarily on increases in ocean temperatures and the impact of coral bleaching on the U.S.'s Pacific coral reefs and the communities that depend on them. Findings from the analysis are presented in a publication series, Coral Reef Resilience and Social Vulnerability to Climate Change, for the main Hawaiian Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

The coral reef resilience indices include 7 ecological factors and temperature variability. The ecological data were derived from NCRMP datasets from 2013 to 2015 -- including coral demographic surveys (coral diversity, coral disease, juvenile coral density, bleaching resistant corals), reef fish surveys (herbivorous fish biomass, fishing depletion), and photoquadrat surveys (macroalgal cover) -- with factor selection and calculation following McClanahan et al. (2012) and Maynard et al. (2015). Temperature variability data are from Heron et al. (2016). The 8 factors were normalized and combined to derive total resilience, bleaching resistance, coral competitiveness and other stressors. All social vulnerability data were derived from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS), analyzed following Kleiber et al. (2018). Social vulnerability indices include housing characteristics, labor force, personal disruption, population composition, and poverty. Exposure data presented in the publication series are directly from van Hooidonk et al. (2016) and are not included with this dataset.

The geographic data file to plot the ecological data generated from the analysis are included with this dataset. The social data can be plotted using the TIGER Line shapefiles for county subdivisions from the U.S. Census Bureau.