Chagos Archipelago - Salomons Island (BISA106)

Setting

BISA106 is a protected, submerged fringing forereef outside Salomon lagoon (station CTD cast to 20.5 m), surveyed 29 April 2015.

General benthic features

Across 28 genera, Porites leads at 19% of the benthos, 41% of live coral, then Acropora 6.2% and Lobophyllia 4.9%, over a floor where coralline algae cover 22% of the benthos (57% of the algal cover), with almost no sediment-laden turf. Total cover is nearly flat down the profile — 44%, 52%, 45%, 53%, 36% — while the assemblage turns over completely: an Acropora-led shallow fringe, a Porites core through the middle three strata that peaks at 42% of the benthos and 79% of that stratum's coral, then a deep inversion where Acropora returns at 13%, Pachyseris jumps from 0.1% to 12% and only six genera remain. The free-living fungiids Herpolitha and Fungia, with Goniopora and Alveopora, read more sheltered than the forereef label implies.

Coral cover

• Reference: Mayfield & Dempsey (2026)
• CoralNet submission package
• Ten transects across all five depth strata and 4,200 points recorded 47% coral against 39% algae, with 5.1% bare substrate, and a transect range of only 36% to 60%.
• That final stratum is one 100-point transect carrying a tenth of the headline, so read it as indicative.
• Live hard coral measured on the in situ benthic transects of the LOF BIOT-1 expedition (the mean of all of this station's transects), against total algal cover (all algal groups) of 39% of the benthos.
• The transect figure is this site's authoritative cover value; no image-derived product overrides it.
• Transect mean 47 ± 2.5% SE (n = 10 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean, and the published station value, which weights each depth equally, is 46% (Mayfield & Dempsey 2026, Oceans, supplemental S1).

Stressors

Condition cannot be assessed: Anderson did not dive here and no photographs exist, so there are no CoralNet or Coralscapes products and no observation of bleaching, disease, predation, crown-of-thorns, or fauna — unavailable, not zero. No mean bleaching value was published for this site, so it contributes nothing to any archipelago bleaching statistic, and the transect figure is its only cover number. The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 1.7% cyanobacteria and 0.2% recently dead coral; they carry no bleaching, disease, or crown-of-thorns field.

Comparisons with other data

Sannassy Pilly et al. (2024) surveyed a nearby station (Ile Passe), 0.21 km from the pin. Within 5 km, six independent stations recorded station-year means of 6.8–63% hard coral cover between 2006 and 2020; the nearest of these, XL Catlin Seaview Survey at transect 36018, 1.69 km away, read 22% in 2015.

Other notes

The transect record's value to the archive is reliability rather than extremity.