Chagos Archipelago - Salomons Island (BISA106)

Setting

BISA106 is a protected submerged forereef outside Salomon lagoon at 20.5 m, surveyed 29 April 2015; the published reef-type cell is blank, so no class is asserted, though the CRD page calls it a barrier forereef.

General benthic features

Across 28 genera, 35th of 109, Porites leads at 18.26% of the benthos, 39.7% of live coral, then Acropora 7.37% and Lobophyllia 4.41%, over a floor that is 55% coralline algae with almost no sediment-laden turf. Total cover is nearly flat down the profile — 44.4%, 51.9%, 45.1%, 52.6%, 36.0% — while the assemblage turns over completely: an Acropora-led shallow fringe, a Porites core through the middle three strata that peaks at 41.70% of the benthos and 79% of that stratum's coral, then a deep inversion where Acropora returns at 13.00%, Pachyseris jumps from 0.10% to 12.00% 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

Ten transects across all five depth strata and 4,200 points recorded 46.0% coral against 38.1% algae — 33rd of 109 Chagos sites for cover, 60th for algae — with 5.78% bare substrate, and a transect range of only 36% to 60%, the tightest relative spread of the seven photo-less Chagos sites. That final stratum is one 100-point transect carrying a fifth of the headline, so read it as indicative. Coral cover: 46%. Live hard coral measured on the in situ benthic transects of the LOF BIOT-1 expedition (Mayfield & Dempsey 2026, Oceans, supplemental S1), against algal cover of 38.1% of the benthos. The transect figure is this site's authoritative cover value; no image-derived product overrides it.

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. The published Mean(%bleaching) cell is blank, so the site contributes nothing to any archipelago bleaching statistic, and the transect figure is its only cover number.

Comparisons with other data

No independent survey was made at this exact site; the nearest ones are listed in the table below.

Other notes

Its value to the archive is reliability rather than extremity.