Fig. 4: Projected coral bleaching and mortality impacts during the Third Global Coral Bleaching Event (GCBE3).
From: Severe and widespread coral reef damage during the 2014-2017 Global Coral Bleaching Event
Model-predicted extent of reefs impacted by moderate or greater (>10% of corals) bleaching (solid diamonds) and moderate or greater mortality (sub-diamonds, outlined in white inside the larger diamonds) for the 21 GCBE3 regions (Supplementary Data 1), in units of number of ~5 × 5 km2 satellite pixels (scale at left). The central solid-black line denotes the Equator through annual cycles. Colors represent the maximum heat stress in each region in that bleaching year (DHW in units of °C-weeks, scale at lower-left); to improve legibility, white text was used in diamonds for heat stress below 2 °C-weeks and above 9 °C-weeks; black text was used for 2–9 °C-weeks. The inset (top-right) indicates the total reef area for each GCBE3 region (scale divisions in the inset correspond with the area scale at the lower left of the main image). Predicted mortality is shown only where the area exceeded 500 pixels (~0.1% of global reef pixels). The Eastern Atlantic region was not shown due to a small reef area (4 of 53,997 reef pixels). Heat stress values for reef-containing pixels used to estimate location-specific bleaching and mortality are provided in Supplementary Table 3. The data and code to generate this figure are provided in Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15114357).
