N. GBR - Blue (AUHK46)

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)

2014-09-10

Coordinates

-14.4292, 145.4502

Coral cover

31%

Benthic transects+photo-quadrats

Observations

not yet tagged for this site

Heat stress

Today’s heat load

24.8°C 0.0°C-weeks

3 Oct 2026 · No heat stress

5-year thermal stress load

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

7.8°C-weeksⁱ

2021–2025

NOAA Coral Reef Watch — 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

Northern GBR (NOAA CRW virtual station)

Survey depth (expedition team)

6.3 m

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

Sea surface temp. (satellite)

24.8°C

satellite sea surface temperature (SST) on the survey date (NOAA Coral Reef Watch, 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

One independent survey station shown with the program’s logo — click one to see how far it is from this site.

Four 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, Yonge, Hicks, and Carter Reefs, northern Great Barrier Reef (Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation; opens in a new window)

Site description

Setting

Global Reef Expedition station AUHK46 on Hicks Reef, northern Great Barrier Reef (-14.4292, 145.4502), surveyed on 10 September 2014, in a Habitat Protection (Blue) Zone, where line fishing is permitted.

Coral cover

Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
The in situ benthic transects recorded 31% live coral cover against a 58% algal fraction at a survey depth of 6.3 m.
That transect value is the authoritative cover figure for this site, and no photographs exist for the site.
Transect mean 31 ± 1.9% SE (n = 6 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is the expedition's station value.

Stressors

Regional context only: surveyed about eighteen months before the 2016 mass bleaching, an event that severely bleached hundreds of reefs on the northern Great Barrier Reef (Hughes et al. 2017); thermal stress at the Northern GBR virtual station now runs at a 5-year mean annual maximum of 7.8 degree heating weeks.

Comparisons with other data

No other surveys have been conducted at this site to date. Within 5 km, one independent station, AIMS manta tow at HILDER REEF, 4.71 km away, read 5.5–40% between 1994 and 2023.

Independent surveys nearby

Within 5 km, 1 independent survey station recorded hard coral cover in 4 surveys between 1994 and 2023. The one station surveyed in more than one year declined by 0.3 points between its first and latest surveys. The longest record, HILDER REEF (AIMS manta tow, 4.71 km away), went from 39% in 1994 to 39% in 2023. One survey since 2021 recorded 39%. This site's own estimate (31%) is not compared with these surveys: none lies within 2 km.

Collected by other programs using different methods (AIMS manta tow is a towed visual estimate in categorical bins), so these are context for the figures above, not a like-for-like comparison. Where a station was surveyed more than once, the cell shows either the range of its values or, as a single value, the mean of surveys made in one year. Station names are not dive-site names.

Independent survey data near this site
Agency	Site / location	Date	Hard coral cover (%)	Distance	Link
AIMS manta tow	HILDER REEF	1994–2023	5.5–40% (4 surveys)	4.71 km	doi:10.25845/5c09b0abf315a

Data & links

Data are from the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation Global Reef Expedition, Coral Reef Diagnostics, and the organizations named in the data sources above.