Part of the regional summaries: Australia (GBR) - Far North: Green stations (no-take reefs) and Australia (GBR)
More info
Far Northern GBR (NOAA CRW virtual station)Three independent survey stations shown with the program’s logo — click one to see how far it is from this site.
Nine 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, Five Reefs and unnamed reef 11-238, northern Great Barrier Reef (Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation; opens in a new window)
Site description
Setting
Global Reef Expedition station AU74152 on Unnamed Reef 74, far northern Great Barrier Reef (-13.4989, 144.0600), surveyed on 29 September 2014 and paired with AU74151.
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 26% algal fraction at a survey depth of 8.2 m.
- Transect mean 34 ± 5.6% SE (n = 8 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 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); 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 other surveys have been conducted at this site to date. Within 5 km, three XL Catlin Seaview Survey stations recorded 16–32% hard coral cover between 2012 and 2016; the nearest, XL Catlin Seaview Survey at transect 15022, 2.48 km away, read 17–32% between 2012 and 2016.
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 8.0%, plating Acropora 24%, massive corals 18% of colonizable substrate, 22 images, 2024-11-20, 0.64 km.
- Great Reef Census (citizen science, AI + volunteer image analysis): branching Acropora 3.6%, plating Acropora 7.2%, massive corals 9.1% of colonizable substrate, 29 images, 2022-11-26, 0.96 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).
Independent surveys nearby
LOF Global Reef ExpeditionYear-average (illustrative only, programs differ)Within 5 km, 3 independent survey stations recorded hard coral cover in 6 surveys between 2012 and 2016. Of the 3 stations surveyed in more than one year, 1 declined by more than 7 points between their first and latest surveys; 2 changed by 7 points or less, inside the 7-point method-noise floor (inconclusive). Three stations share the longest span (2012–2016); one, transect 15022 (XL Catlin Seaview Survey, 2.48 km away), went from 32% in 2012 to 17% in 2016. The most recent nearby survey is from 2016, so these values predate recent heat stress. This site's own estimate (41%) is not compared with these surveys: none lies within 2 km.
Collected by other programs using different methods (the XL Catlin Seaview Survey uses photo-transects with automated image annotation), 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.
| Agency | Site / location | Date | Hard coral cover (%) | Distance | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| XL Catlin Seaview Survey | transect 15022 | 2012–2016 | 17–32% (2 surveys) | 2.48 km | doi:10.14264/uql.2019.930 |
| XL Catlin Seaview Survey | transect 15023 | 2012–2016 | 26–32% (2 surveys) | 3.01 km | doi:10.14264/uql.2019.930 |
| XL Catlin Seaview Survey | transect 15024 | 2012–2016 | 16% (2 surveys) | 4.62 km | doi:10.14264/uql.2019.930 |
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, Coral Reef Diagnostics, and the organizations named in the data sources above.
© Coral Reef Diagnostics.