Images of coral colonies sampled at four time points in 2019: July (prior to bleaching), August (during a coral bleaching event), October (during the post-bleaching recovery period), and December (a cool-water period in which corals had fully recovered from bleaching) (NCEI Accession 0243645)

Reef-building corals (Orbicella faveolata) were sampled at both inshore (The Rocks and Cheeca Rocks) and offshore reefs (Little Conch and Crocker Reef) under Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS) permit FKNMS-2019-067 to develop molecular biomarker-based predictive models of coral bleaching susceptibility via hindcasting. By looking at molecular signatures of corals that both did and did not resist bleaching in the months prior to high-temperature events, we can later profile the cellular behavior of corals about which we have no information with respect to resilience and use these models to make conjectures about future bleaching likelihood. The underlying models, which will be submitted as part of a future submission package, feature machine-learning algorithms that relate protein biology to bleaching susceptibility. In this submission, I am providing the images of all sampled corals at each sampling time, as well as the field sampling reports that were provided to the FKNMS office shortly after each field trip.