N. GBR - Blue (AUPK59)

Setting

Global Reef Expedition station AUPK59 on Jewell Reef, northern Great Barrier Reef (-14.4350, 145.3450), surveyed on 12 September 2014 on that day's third dive, in a Habitat Protection (Blue) Zone, where line fishing is permitted. The notes describe a murky, wave-battered backreef with visibility down to 3-4 m in places; the reef crested at 1-2 m, too rough to explore safely, while deeper water at 20-25 m held only scattered small corals over an evidently hard coral-built, silt-covered bottom. The two photographs show the slope below the crest: a mix of small corymbose and branching colonies, pocilloporids, lobed massive, and encrusting colonies, and a green lobed colony, thinning into hazy blue water (e.g., Image 1, Image 2).

12

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• The in situ benthic transects recorded 20% live coral cover against a 40% algal fraction — algae twice the coral fraction.
• One transect was scored at this station (20%; n = 1, so no SE; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); it is the expedition's station value printed above.
• Cover looked best in the shallows, estimated by eye at 30-40% around 3-4 m, though Anderson flagged that some of that may have been soft rather than hard coral, given how hard the two were to separate in the gloom.

Stressors

His notes record silt over the deeper hard bottom: on his 20.5 m transect "most of the substrate is covered in silt/sediment," and at 15 m the bottom was "mostly silt-covered coral rubble." Regional context, not an observation here: 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); 5-year mean annual maximum thermal stress at the Far Northern GBR virtual station is 11.1 degree heating weeks.

Fish and other fauna

A meter-long Napoleon wrasse was logged; no COTS, bleaching, or disease appear in the notes.

Comparisons with other data

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

Other notes

The expedition's field report lists this day's site as "Jewell / Parke Reef," and its station code AUPK59 points to Parke Reef; Anderson's notes and sheet log the dive as Jewell Reef (sheet code AUJE59), the name used here.