N. GBR - Green (AUR703)

Setting

Global Reef Expedition station AUR703 on Ribbon Reef 7, northern Great Barrier Reef (-15.2077, 145.7543), surveyed on 3 September 2014. The expedition surveyed Ribbon Reef 7 as one of its Green (Marine National Park Zone, no-take) reefs; on the GBRMPA zoning map the recorded position itself falls in the adjoining Buffer Zone, about 60 m outside the Marine National Park Zone boundary, a distance within the precision of a dive-site GPS fix on a reef edge.

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• The in situ benthic transects recorded 44% live coral cover against a 28% algal fraction at a survey depth of 5.9 m.
• Transect mean 44 ± 3.7% SE (n = 6 transects; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); the headline above is the expedition's station value.

Stressors

Regional context only: this was 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.