Fiji - Vanua Balavu (FJVB64)

Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation — Global Reef Expedition

Part of the regional summaries: Fiji - Vanua Balavu, Fiji - Northern Lau (Vanua Balavu / Cicia / Nayau), and Fiji - Lau

Outlier score: 3.89/5 (Vanua Balavu, n = 18 corals with an outlier score). The share of those corals whose molecular stress profile was an outlier, rescaled to 0-5 (5 = no outliers); an island-level measure (Mayfield et al. 2017), not a Coral Health Index.

Country

Fiji

Survey date(s)

2013-06-24

Coordinates

-17.3364, -178.8600

Coral cover

2.5%

± 2.5% SE, n = 2 transects · Benthic transects+photo-quadrats

Observations

None tagged; see Stressors below

Heat stress

Most recent heat load record

25.8°C 0.0°C-weeks

26 Oct 2026 · No heat stress

5-year thermal stress load

5-year mean max. degree heating weeks (DHW)

8.9°C-weeksⁱ

2021–2025

NOAA Coral Reef Watch — Fiji virtual station

i 5-year mean max. DHW is the mean of the annual maximum DHWs over the five complete years named above, not conditions today.

More info

Fiji (NOAA CRW virtual station)

Site summary

Read this summary in:

A Vanua Balavu station with almost no live coral (2.5%); the survey team dived it to 15.2 m. About two-fifths of the benthos was sand, rubble, and other non-coral cover rather than algae. Surveyed on the Living Oceans Foundation's Global Reef Expedition.

Max. depth (team dive log)

15.2 m

expedition team log maximum (not Anderson's own dive)

Water temp. during survey

26.8°Cⁱⁱ
CTD-cast midpoint of 26.8–26.9°C

-1.0°C vs the 2013 mean sea temperature (27.8°C)

ii Station CTD-cast midpoint (LOF metadata), not a dive reading: the Living Oceans Foundation station metadata for Fiji give the CTD cast at FJVB64 on 24 June 2013 a maximum of 26.86°C and a minimum of 26.81°C; the value shown, 26.8°C, is their midpoint.

Bottom time

68 min

in at 14:47

Two other CRD dive sites with their own pages 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

FJVB64 is a Vanua Balavu station, surveyed on 24 June 2013 during the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition. The survey team's bottom time was 68 minutes.

Coral cover

Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
At FJVB64, an in situ point-count transect on 24 June 2013 (station CTD cast to 13.4 m) recorded just 2.5% live coral cover, against 55% total algal cover.
Worth reading carefully: the two figures together account for only 57% of the transect, so about two-fifths of the surveyed substrate was sand, rubble, soft corals, or other benthos rather than either coral or algae.
This is a reef zone with almost no live hard coral in it, not simply an algae-smothered one.
Transect mean 2.5 ± 2.5% SE (n = 2 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is this all-transect mean.

Stressors

The Living Oceans Foundation transects here recorded 4.5% cyanobacteria and no recently dead coral; they carry no bleaching, disease, or crown-of-thorns field. 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 Severe Tropical Cyclone Winston passed over Vanua Balavu in February 2016 (IBTrACS best track, NOAA NCEI) — both stated as context, not as causes observed here.

Comparisons with other data

Apart from the Living Oceans Foundation survey shown here, we found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. If you would like to share yours, please email us.

No underwater photographs from this station are on file.

Data & links

Data are from the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition, Coral Reef Diagnostics, and NOAA Coral Reef Watch.