N. GBR - Green (AUR706)

Setting

Global Reef Expedition station AUR706, a shallow, murky lagoonal site on Ribbon Reef 7, northern Great Barrier Reef (-15.2221, 145.7391), surveyed on 3 September 2014 in a no-take Green Zone.

General benthic features

The reef was silty and no deeper than 12.3 m, built around dense, wrist-thick Acropora thickets with abundant Stylophora pistillata and Pocillopora damicornis and small massive Porites between. The one published frame shows a thicket of brown staghorn Acropora with pale growing tips over silty sand, with a few bare, algae-dusted branches among the living ones (e.g., Image 1).

1

Structural relief was high, and eight coral recruits were counted on five transects (1.6 per transect); no bleaching, disease, or crown-of-thorns starfish were reported.

Coral cover

• Reference: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Global Reef Expedition (in situ transect)
• The in situ benthic transects recorded 22% live coral cover against a 41% algal fraction on a dive to 12.3 m — algae close to twice the coral fraction.
• One transect was scored at this station (22%; n = 1, so no SE; Living Oceans Foundation per-transect benthic data); it is the expedition's station value printed above.

Stressors

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 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.

Other notes

Anderson's notes record the site as found well off its charted GBRMPA coordinates, so the mapped position is approximate.