Philippines - El Nido: Abdens (Bacuit Archipelago)
Part of the regional summaries: Philippines - Palawan and Philippines
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Western Philippines (NOAA CRW virtual station)Abdens is Acropora country, with broad continuous fields of tabular plates culminating in one magnificent table several meters across, plus dense branching thickets, massive coral domes, and brain corals. The reef reads healthy, with pale margins reflecting growth rather than bleaching. A blind Claude computer-vision point count puts coral cover around 42%.
Ang Abdens ay lupain ng Acropora, na may malalawak at tuloy-tuloy na latag ng mga tabular na plato na nagtatapos sa isang napakagandang mesa na ilang metro ang lapad, kasama ang masinsing kasukalan ng sumasangang koral, mga bunton ng malalaking (massive) koral, at brain coral. Mukhang malusog ang bahura; ang maputlang gilid ng mga kolonya ay tanda ng paglaki, hindi ng pamumuti. Ayon sa blind point count ng Claude computer vision, humigit-kumulang 42% ang saklaw ng koral.
Salin ng buod na ito gamit ang AI; ang Ingles ang opisyal na bersyon.
One independent survey station shown with the program’s logo — click one to see how far it is from this site.
Site description
Setting
The topside frame (not shown) shows the Bacuit karst rising straight out of the sea behind the boat.
General benthic features
Abdens is Acropora country. Broad fields of tabular Acropora cover the substrate almost continuously — overlapping brown plates with clean pale growing margins — culminating in one magnificent isolated table several meters across that Anderson photographed and named in its own right (e.g., Image 3, Image 4, Image 5, Image 20).
Between and around the tables are dense branching and staghorn Acropora thickets, massive coral domes, maze-patterned brain corals, foliose and plating colonies, and yellow Seriatopora (e.g., Image 1, Image 6, Image 8, Image 9, Image 10, Image 12, Image 13, Image 16, Image 17, Image 18, Image 19).
Coral cover
- Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
- Coral cover: 42% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 20 of Anderson's edited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table.
Stressors
The reef reads healthy: the pale margins on the tables are growing edge, not bleaching. Two white patches are recent mortality of unstated cause: one on a single colony, and a dead patch on the large table, under its overlapping tier; neither is a site-level signal.
Fish and other fauna
The pincushion sea star Culcita novaeguineae appears in its own frame, identified by Anderson, and sergeant majors and damselfishes work the water above the plates, with orange and red encrusting sponges filling the gaps (e.g., Image 2, Image 7, Image 11, Image 14, Image 15).
Comparisons with other data
We found no other surveys at this site as of 2026. Within 5 km, one independent station, Reef Check at Abdeen's Rock, 2.69 km away, read 42–61% between 2013 and 2014.
Dive record
The third and final Bacuit Archipelago dive of 24 January 2017, in at 14:37 for 63 minutes to a maximum of 20.1 m (mean 11.6 m) at 27.6°C average (dive-computer minimum 26.7°C); all 21 frames were reviewed, one of them topside.
CV model comparison
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A few low-cover photos (sand, rubble, or open bottom) pull the mean down; 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.More info
DINOv3 and CoralSCOP were run on the same photos and are listed for comparison. Coralscapes v2 is shown as its own row for comparison only: the author does not consider Coralscapes reliable for these photos, so it is low confidence and never enters any average or summary. No diver transect exists for this trip, so agreement between the rows is not accuracy, and no computer-vision method yet estimates coral cover accurately on new images; treat every row as indicative.| Method | Hard coral cover (%) | Photos (n) ± SE |
|---|---|---|
| In-house DINOv3 | 23.4 | n = 20 · SE 1.2 |
| CoralSCOP edited | 34.4 | n = 20 · SE 4.3 |
| Claude (edited photos) | 42.1 | n = 20 · SE 5.6 |
| Coralscapes v2 (low confidence, never averaged) | 67.0 |
The two computer-vision methods disagree by 11.0 pp (23.4–34.4%) and read 7.7–18.7 pp below Claude's blind point count (42.1%); the headline is Claude's blind point count because no transect or manual count exists here.
See a more detailed, stand-alone version of this table.
Independent surveys nearby
Coral Reef DiagnosticsWithin 5 km, 1 independent survey station recorded hard coral cover in 4 surveys between 2013 and 2014. The one station surveyed in more than one year increased by 19 points between its first and latest surveys. The longest record, Abdeen's Rock (Reef Check, 2.69 km away), went from 42% in 2013 (mean of 2 surveys) to 61% in 2014 (mean of 2 surveys). The most recent nearby survey is from 2014, so these values predate recent heat stress. This site's own estimate (42%) 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.
| Agency | Site / location | Date | Hard coral cover (%) | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reef Check | Abdeen's Rock | 2013–2014 | 42–61% (range of yearly means; 4 surveys) | 2.69 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.