Dataset: Coral bleaching experimental methods

Literature Search
A literature search was initiated using the ISI Web of Science database and search engine using the following string to identify relevant peer-reviewed publications: Title = coral, Topic = temperature AND bleach*. The initial search returned 1144 publications from 1992 to April 2019. Each publication was examined to assess if the study included the following elements: (1) an experimentally elevated temperature (thus excluding observational surveys conducted after natural bleaching events, and reciprocal transplant/common garden experiments), (2) samples that were either adult corals, planula larvae, or gametes (thus excluding host-tissue explants, ex-hospite and culture-grown Symbiodiniaceae and other microbes), and (3) at least one coral species in the order Scleractinia. The 1144 publications were checked twice to minimize the likelihood of omitting studies which met the above criteria. Two hundred and forty-three publications met all criteria. In some instances, multiple publications were found to report different aspects of the same heat-stress experiment (e.g., Rodrigues & Grottoli, 2006 and Rodrigues et al. 2008). However, because duplication was often not consistently explicit, all publications were treated as independent experiments to avoid erroneously omitting or merging studies. Similarly, twelve publications (<5%) included descriptions of two or more different experiments. These were divided into separate studies, bringing the total number of heat-stress experiments to 255. The data for this review were collected between April and June 2019.

Data Collection
The collated data were split into three sections and correspond to each goal: (1) temporal, spatial, and taxonomic information, (2) experimental design information, and (3) measured coral response variables. The information collected from each publication reviewed is described in the Supplemental File, Data_Collection.pdf (662 KB).