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As coral reefs endure increasing levels of disturbance, understanding recovery patterns of reef-building hard corals is paramount to assessing the sustainability of these ecosystems. At local scales, coral recovery slows down; however, it's unclear how this trend propagates across spatial scales due to the inherent complexity of coral dynamics. In this paper, we aimed to learn about fine scale heterogeneity of coral dynamics and explore implications for assessing coral recovery at larger spatial scales. We developed a spatio-temporal statistical model to estimate long-term trajectories of three types of corals and predict their recovery patterns at unobserved locations within a reef. Then, model predictions were used to derive metrics that capture the interplay between coral growth and decline from disturbance(s) across time, space and growth morphology. This model is developed in the context of a substantive case study at Heron Reef using a high spatio-temporal resolution dataset
Heron-reefBranching-coralCoral-coverDisturbanceLate-coralResiliencePatial-scalesPatio-temporal-modelling