Part of the regional summaries: Australia (GBR) - Far North: Green stations (no-take reefs) and Australia (GBR)
More info
Northern GBR (NOAA CRW virtual station)Two 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, Lark, Williamson, and unnamed reef 15-043, northern Great Barrier Reef (Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation; opens in a new window)
Site description
Setting
Global Reef Expedition station AULK22 on Lark Reef, northern Great Barrier Reef (-15.2921, 145.6253), surveyed on 6 September 2014, in a no-take Marine National Park (Green) Zone.
Coral cover
- Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
- The in situ benthic transects recorded 4.0% live coral cover against a 71% algal fraction at a survey depth of 5.0 m.
- That transect value is the authoritative cover figure for this site, and no photographs exist for the site.
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 Northern GBR virtual station is 7.8 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 2.6%, plating Acropora 1.8%, massive corals 6.6% of colonizable substrate, 55 images, 2023-10-12, 1.18 km.
- Great Reef Census (citizen science, AI + volunteer image analysis): branching Acropora 1.6%, plating Acropora 1.6%, massive corals 14% of colonizable substrate, 49 images, 2023-10-13, 1.86 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. 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).
Other notes
The field report's station table lists this position under AUR517; its rows for 5-6 September 2014 are shifted by two stations, and the 933-site table and Anderson's notes place AUR517 on Ribbon Reef 5.
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.