Coral Reef Diagnostics

Maldives - Georgia's Reef

Reef Check Foundation
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Part of the regional summaries: Maldives - Central (Male Atolls / Ari / Vaavu) and Maldives

05
Coral Health Index: TBD
Photo: Anderson Mayfield/Coral Reef Diagnostics
Country
Maldives
Survey date(s)
2017-05-15
Coordinates
4.2646, 73.4218
Approximate position.
Coral cover
22%
Claude computer vision (34 edited photos) · other methods below · median 14%
Observations
crown-of-thorns
Heat stress
Most recent heat load record
30.1°C0.0°C-weeks
26 Oct 2026 · Bleaching Watch
5-year thermal stress load
5-year mean max. degree heating weeks (DHW)
2.2°C-weeksi
2021–2025
NOAA Coral Reef Watch — Maldives virtual station
i 5-year mean max. DHW is the mean of the annual maximum DHWs over the five complete years named above, not conditions today.
More infoMaldives (NOAA CRW virtual station)
Photographs
35
26 shown on this page
Site summary
Read this summary in:

A first-leg site with genuine coral thickets — bottlebrush and staghorn branching stands, finger Porites hillsides, shingled plate corals — though crown-of-thorns starfish keep turning up here: divers from Coral Reef CPR and Carpe Diem Maldives removed 227 on the two dives of 15 May 2017.

Max. depth dived
29.6 m
sample-sheet maximum
Sea surface temp. (satellite)
30.3°C
satellite sea surface temperature (SST) on the survey date (NOAA Coral Reef Watch, Maldives), not an in-water reading; it is the warmest-pixel (90th percentile) reading in the station area and can run 1–1.5°C above the reef

Three independent survey stations shown with the program’s logo — click one to see how far it is from this site.

13 of the 26 photographs on this page are shown beside the text that discusses them under "Site description" below.

123891013141516171823

Photo credit & attribution

Site description

Setting

Dived twice on 15 May 2017.

General benthic features

Georgia's Reef piles branching coral into honest-to-goodness thickets: bottlebrush and staghorn branching stands flickering with humbug damselfish, hillsides of living finger Porites, plate corals shingled like roof tiles, even a coral head studded with blue-gray urn tunicates and another draped in electric-blue sponge (e.g., Image 6, Image 7, Image 11, Image 12, Image 20, Image 21, Image 22, Image 24, Image 25).

6Image 67Image 711Image 1112Image 1220Image 2021Image 2122Image 2224Image 2425Image 25

Coral cover

Stressors

Paradise has a tax collector: on the two dives of 15 May 2017 divers from Coral Reef CPR and Carpe Diem Maldives removed 227 crown-of-thorns starfish (Anderson's field sheet; Coral Reef CPR lists the reef as Black Coral Reef), including one large blue-spined seastar called a "monster" (e.g., Image 26); another is shown on the reef (e.g., Image 19).

26Image 2619Image 19

Fish and other fauna

Yellow bluestripe-type snappers pour through the shallows in a solid golden river (e.g., Image 4, Image 5).

4Image 45Image 5

Comparisons with other data

We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, three Reef Check stations recorded station-year means of 30–43% hard coral cover between 2010 and 2016; the nearest, Reef Check at Baros House Reef, 2.21 km away, read 36–43% between 2010 and 2016.

CV model comparison

Mean 22%, median 14% across 34 photos.
More infoA few colony-focused photos raise the mean; the median is the typical photo. No computer-vision method yet estimates coral cover accurately on new images, so treat this as indicative rather than a measurement; it is revised as the methods improve.
Headline: Claude computer vision, a blind point count of this site's own photographs.
More infoOther rows are for comparison only and are never averaged. No diver transect exists for these photos, so agreement between rows is not accuracy.
MethodHard coral cover (%)Photos (n) ± SE
In-house DINOv316.7
CoralSCOP edited23.1
Claude (edited photos)22.2n = 34 · SE 4.2

The two computer-vision methods agree within 6.4 pp (16.7–23.1%) and read within 5.5 pp of Claude's blind point count (22.2%).

See a more detailed, stand-alone version of this table.

Independent surveys nearby

Hard coral cover over time — this site and every independent station within 5 km. Programs are shown separately because they use different methods at different stations; the lines are not one comparable series.
0%12%24%36%48%201020132017Reef Check 2010: 38%Reef Check 2011: 30%Reef Check 2012: 38%Reef Check 2013: 33%Reef Check 2014: 36%Reef Check 2016: 43%Coral Reef Diagnostics 2017: 22%Year-averaged across all programs: illustrative only; the programs differ in stations and method, so no trend is claimed (7 years)
Reef Check Coral Reef DiagnosticsYear-average (illustrative only, programs differ)

Within 5 km, 3 independent survey stations recorded hard coral cover in 9 surveys between 2010 and 2016. The one station surveyed in more than one year increased by 5.0 points between its first and latest surveys. The longest record, Baros House Reef (Reef Check, 2.21 km away), went from 38% in 2010 to 43% in 2016 (mean of 2 surveys). The most recent nearby survey is from 2016, so these values predate recent heat stress. This site's own estimate (22%) is not compared with these surveys: none lies within 2 km.

Collected by other programs using different methods (Reef Check uses point-intercept transects), 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.

Independent survey data near this site
AgencySite / locationDateHard coral cover (%)Distance
Reef CheckBaros House Reef2010–201636–43% (range of yearly means; 6 surveys)2.21 km
Reef CheckBaros House Reef201130%2.63 km
Reef CheckBanyan Tree House Reef201333%, mean of 2 surveys (5 m and 8 m)4.71 km

Data & links

All images from Coral Reef Diagnostics. Data are from Coral Reef Diagnostics and the organizations named in the data sources above.

© Coral Reef Diagnostics.