N. GBR - Blue (AU116158)

Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation — Global Reef Expedition

Part of the regional summaries: Australia (GBR) - Far North: Blue stations (Habitat Protection Zone reefs) and Australia (GBR)

Country

Australia

Survey date(s)

2014-09-30

Coordinates

-13.5600, 144.0805

Coral cover

41%

Benthic transects+photo-quadrats

Observations

not yet tagged for this site

Heat stress

Today’s heat load

25.2°C 0.0°C-weeks

3 Oct 2026 · No heat stress

5-year thermal stress load

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

11.1°C-weeksⁱ

2021–2025

NOAA Coral Reef Watch — Far Northern GBR 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

Far Northern GBR (NOAA CRW virtual station)

Survey depth (expedition team)

5.9 m

Living Oceans Foundation (LOF) benthic survey depth; no dive by Anderson at this station

Sea surface temp. (satellite)

25.1°C

satellite sea surface temperature (SST) on the survey date (NOAA Coral Reef Watch, Far Northern GBR), not an in-water reading; it is the warmest-pixel (90th percentile) reading in the station area and can run 1–1.5°C above the reef

Three other CRD dive sites within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.

Site description

Setting

Global Reef Expedition station AU116158 on Unnamed Reef 116, far northern Great Barrier Reef (-13.5600, 144.0805), surveyed on 30 September 2014 and paired with AU116157.

Coral cover

Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
The in situ benthic transects recorded 41% live coral cover against a 53% algal fraction at a survey depth of 5.9 m.
That transect value is the authoritative cover figure for this site, and no photographs exist for the site.
Transect mean 40 ± 4.1% SE (n = 6 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is the expedition's station value (the headline weights each depth equally; one depth had a single transect).

Stressors

Regional context, not an observation here: this pre-dates the 2016 mass bleaching by about eighteen months, an event that severely bleached hundreds of reefs on the northern Great Barrier Reef (Hughes et al. 2017); the 5-year mean annual maximum thermal stress at the Far Northern GBR virtual station is 11.1 degree heating weeks.

Comparisons with other data

No prior survey data from this site. If you would like to share yours, please email us.

Nearby citizen-science imagery within 2 km (not a survey of this site, and not total coral cover):

Great Reef Census (citizen science, AI + volunteer image analysis): branching Acropora 4.5%, plating Acropora 21%, massive corals 17% of colonizable substrate, 35 images, 2024-11-21, 1.27 km.

The Great Reef Census scores three coral shapes only, so every other coral is left out, and its denominator is colonizable substrate (sand, water, and shadow excluded): these values are not hard coral cover and should not be added together or compared with the cover figures on this page. The photographs are taken by volunteer snorkelers 3–5 m above the reef. In the program's own validation (Lawson et al. 2025, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 197:814, doi:10.1007/s10661-025-14261-6, open access), each analysis method on its own differed from expert estimates by up to about 9.5 percentage points on average for these coral types (AI alone: plating Acropora −9.1 points; AI plus volunteers: branching Acropora +9.5 points); the program's “~99% accurate” figure is the average over about 8,000 images after choosing the better method for each coral type, and site values from fewer images carry more error. Sites with fewer than 40 images have fewer images than the 40–80 the method needs to estimate site-level values to within 5 percentage points. Source: Great Reef Census / Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef; Lawson et al. 2026, Limnology & Oceanography Letters, doi:10.1002/lol2.70168 (data CC BY-NC 4.0, doi:10.7910/DVN/KCULSD).

Data & links

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