Part of the regional summaries: Fiji - Vanua Balavu, Fiji - Northern Lau (Vanua Balavu / Cicia / Nayau), and Fiji - Lau
More info
Fiji (NOAA CRW virtual station)A Vanua Balavu station, dived to 24.4 m, with 28% coral cover, though algae still outweighs coral two to one. One of the two coral colonies from here with an outlier score was flagged as a physiological stress outlier in a 2017 study. Surveyed on the Living Oceans Foundation's Global Reef Expedition.
E dua na vanua ni vakadidike e Vanua Balavu, a nunu kina ki na 24.4 m, ka 28% na ubi ni lase (coral cover), ia e se vakarua na levu ni lumi mai na lase. E dua vei rau na rua na lase eke e tiko na nodrau naba ni duidui (outlier score) a vakaraitaki me duatani ena leqa vakayago (physiological stress outlier) ena dua na vakadidike ni 2017.
AI translation of this summary; the English is authoritative. (low confidence)
CTD-cast midpoint; the cast read 26.8°C throughout
One other CRD dive site with its own page within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.
🗺 Detailed map of the Global Reef Expedition dive sites, Vanua Balavu, Fiji (Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation; opens in a new window)
Site description
Setting
FJVB63 is a Vanua Balavu station, surveyed on 24 June 2013 during the Global Reef Expedition.
Coral cover
- Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
- An in situ point-count transect (station CTD cast to 22.5 m) recorded 28% live coral cover against 64% total algal cover — still algae-weighted by more than two to one.
- Transect mean 28 ± 1.4% SE (n = 4 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean.
Stressors
Context: the Fiji virtual station has averaged an annual maximum of 8.9 degree-heating-weeks over 2021-2025 (NOAA Coral Reef Watch), above the 8 DHW severe-bleaching level, and Cyclone Winston passed over Vanua Balavu in February 2016 (IBTrACS best track, NOAA NCEI). Anderson's photographs of sampled colony F144 also show a small, unsampled colony beside it that was bleached white. The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 12% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral.
Comparisons with other data
The more striking number here is physiological rather than benthic: 50% of the coral colonies from this station with an outlier score (one of two) were flagged as physiological outliers (Mayfield et al. 2017, PLoS ONE). That flag concerns the sampled colonies' physiology and is not itself a bleaching or disease observation; Anderson's sampling sheet records bleaching separately, with two of the ten colonies sampled here 90% and 50% bleached and four more 5–20% pale or bleached.
Dive record
Bottom time was 63 minutes.
Data & links
- Download benthic survey data (CSV) ↗
- Download all LOF-GRE data (933 sites) ↗
- Photo portfolio ↗
- Coral Reef Diagnostics page for this area ↗
All images from Coral Reef Diagnostics. Data are from the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition, Coral Reef Diagnostics, and NOAA Coral Reef Watch.
© Coral Reef Diagnostics.