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)Five 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 AU2592, far northern Great Barrier Reef (-11.0596, 143.1140), surveyed on 19 September 2014. Falls in a Habitat Protection (Blue) Zone, where line fishing is permitted. The expedition's own site table classifies AU2592 as an inner open lagoon reef on an intermediate aspect.
General benthic features
Alongside the hard coral already reported for this site, the same transects recorded 3.0% crustose coralline algae, 8.9% turf, 4.9% macroalgae, and 1.2% cyanobacteria. Non-living substrate came to 8.8% dead coral, 5.0% rubble, and 7.0% sand. These figures come from the expedition's own 933-site benthic master and are survey results, not photographic estimates.
Coral cover
- Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
- Transect mean 28 ± 4.7% SE (n = 11 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is the expedition's station value (the headline weights each depth equally).
Fish and other fauna
Paired fish transects recorded about 20 fish species per transect and about 14 kg per 100 m2 of biomass.
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 3.1%, plating Acropora 12%, massive corals 7.5% of colonizable substrate, 29 images, 2022-11-19, 1.37 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.