Part of the regional summaries: Australia (GBR) - Far North: Blue stations (Habitat Protection Zone reefs) and Australia (GBR)
More info
Far Northern GBR (NOAA CRW virtual station)Three other CRD dive sites within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.
🗺 Detailed map of the Global Reef Expedition dive sites, Milman and Alpin Reefs, northern Great Barrier Reef (Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation; opens in a new window)
Site description
Setting
Global Reef Expedition station AU2578, far northern Great Barrier Reef (-11.0487, 143.0817), surveyed on 15 September 2014. The expedition surveyed Unnamed Reef 11-025 as one of its Blue (Habitat Protection Zone, open to line fishing) reefs; on the GBRMPA zoning map the recorded position itself falls in the adjoining General Use Zone, about 80 m outside the Habitat Protection Zone boundary, a distance within the precision of a dive-site GPS fix on a reef edge.
Coral cover
- Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
- The in situ benthic transects recorded 42% live coral cover against a 45% algal fraction at a survey depth of 6.6 m.
- Transect mean 41 ± 4.3% SE (n = 7 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is the expedition's station value (the headline weights each depth equally).
Stressors
Regional context only: this pre-dates the 2016 mass bleaching by about eighteen months in a sector it hit severely; 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 2.2%, plating Acropora 0.7%, massive corals 4.8% of colonizable substrate, 20 images, 2022-11-19, 1.64 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
- Download benthic survey data (CSV) ↗
- Download all LOF-GRE data (933 sites) ↗
- Photo portfolio ↗
- Coral Reef Diagnostics country page ↗
Data are from the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition and Coral Reef Diagnostics.
© Coral Reef Diagnostics.