Nature Ecology & Evolution 1, 1146–1152 (2017); published online 17 July 2017; corrected online 2 August 2017

In the version of this Article originally published, a statistic relating to the northern Great Barrier Reef was attributed to the Great Barrier Reef as a whole. The sentence should have read ‘In 2016 alone, more than 35% of corals on the northern Great Barrier Reef are estimated to have died following the worst bleaching event ever recorded’. This has been corrected in all versions of the Article.