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The Great Barrier Reef (GBR), Australia, has a long history of palaeoenvironmental coral research. However, it can be logistically difficult to find the relevant research and records, which are often unpublished or exist as “grey literature”. This hinders researchers' abilities to efficiently assess the current state of coral core studies on the GBR and thus identify any key knowledge gaps. This study presents the Great Barrier Reef Coral Skeletal Records Database (GBRCD), which compiles 208 records from coral skeletal research conducted since the early 1990s. The database includes records from the Holocene, from ∼8000 years ago, to the present day; records are from the northern, central, and southern GBR from inshore and offshore locations. Massive Porites spp. coral records comprise the majority (92.5 %) of the database, and the remaining records are from Acropora, Isopora, or Cyphastrea spp. The database includes 78 variables, with Sr/Ca, U/Ca, and Ba/Ca being the most frequently measured. Most records measure data over 10 or more years and are at monthly or lower resolution. The GBRCD is machine readable and easily searchable so that users can find records relevant to their research, e.g. by filtering for site name, time period, or coral type. It is publicly available as comma-separated values (CSV) data and metadata files with entries linked by the unique record ID and as Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) files. The GBRCD is publicly available from the NOAA National Center for Environmental Information World Data Service for Paleoclimatology at https://doi.org/10.25921/hqxk-8h74 (Arzey et al., 2024). The intention is to update the GBRCD annually, depending on the availability of relevant new GBR records or submission of legacy records to the GBRCD for archiving. The collection and curation of existing GBR coral research data provide researchers with the ability to analyse common proxies such as Sr/Ca across multiple locations and/or examine regional to reef-scale trends. The database is also suitable for multi-proxy comparisons and combination or composite analyses to determine overarching changes recorded by the proxies. This database represents the first comprehensive compilation of coral records from the GBR. It enables the investigation of multiple environmental factors via various proxy systems for the GBR, northeastern Australia, and potentially the broader Indo-Pacific region.

The response of the hydrological cycle to anthropogenic climate change, especially across the tropical oceans, remains poorly understood due to the scarcity of long instrumental temperature and hydrological records. Massive shallow-water corals are ideally suited to reconstructing past oceanic variability as they are widely distributed across the tropics, rapidly deposit calcium carbonate skeletons that continuously record ambient environmental conditions, and can be sampled at monthly to annual resolution. Climate reconstructions based on corals primarily use the stable oxygen isotope composition (δ18O), which acts as a proxy for sea surface temperature (SST), and the oxygen isotope composition of seawater (δ18Osw), a measure of hydrological variability. Increasingly, coral δ18O time series are paired with time series of strontium-to-calcium ratios (Sr/Ca), a proxy for SST, from the same coral to quantify temperature and δ18Osw variability through time. To increase the utility of such reconstructions, we present the CoralHydro2k database, a compilation of published, peer-reviewed coral Sr/Ca and δ18O records from the Common Era (CE). The database contains 54 paired Sr/Ca–δ18O records and 125 unpaired Sr/Ca or δ18O records, with 88 % of these records providing data coverage from 1800 CE to the present. A quality-controlled set of metadata with standardized vocabulary and units accompanies each record, informing the use of the database. The CoralHydro2k database tracks large-scale temperature and hydrological variability. As such, it is well-suited for investigations of past climate variability, comparisons with climate model simulations including isotope-enabled models, and application in paleodata-assimilation projects. The CoralHydro2k database is available in Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format with serializations in MATLAB, R, and Python and can be downloaded from the NOAA National Center for Environmental Information's Paleoclimate Data Archive at https://doi.org/10.25921/yp94-v135 (Walter et al., 2022).