Philippines - Port Barton, Palawan: Reef 1 (bay snorkel)

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Part of the regional summaries: Philippines - Palawan and Philippines

Photo: Anderson Mayfield/Coral Reef Diagnostics

Country

Philippines

Survey date(s)

2017-01-20

Coordinates

10.4197, 119.1703

Coral cover

29%^*

Claude computer vision (10 edited photos) · other methods below · median 24%

*Based on only 10 reef-habitat photos; this estimate is less certain.

Observations

None tagged; see Stressors below

Heat stress

Most recent heat load record

30.8°C 2.8°C-weeks

26 Oct 2026 · Bleaching Warning

5-year thermal stress load

5-year mean max. degree heating weeks (DHW)

3.2°C-weeksⁱ

2021–2025

NOAA Coral Reef Watch — Western Philippines 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 info

Western Philippines (NOAA CRW virtual station)

Photographs

10 analyzed

Site summary

Read this summary in:

Reef 1 is a shallow bay snorkel site near Port Barton town with a visibly mixed condition — Anderson recorded pollution-damaged reef beside an unharmed patch — and staghorn thickets showing active juvenile recruitment. A blind Claude computer-vision point count puts coral cover around 29%.

Sea surface temp. (satellite)

28.7°C

satellite sea surface temperature (SST) on the survey date (NOAA Coral Reef Watch, Western Philippines), 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

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

5 of the 8 photographs on this page are shown beside the text that discusses them under "Site description" below.

Photo credit & attribution

Site description

Setting

A shallow inshore snorkel site in the bay near Port Barton town, logged as "Reef 1" and snorkeled 2017-01-20 (08:54-09:00) ahead of the day's dives.

General benthic features

Staghorn and Pocillopora thickets carry active juvenile recruitment alongside a visibly mixed-condition fringing reef — one frame of reef Anderson recorded as damaged by pollution sits beside another of a patch recorded as unharmed, a contrast consistent with the site's proximity to town (e.g., Image 1, Image 2, Image 5, Image 7, Image 8).

Coral cover

Reference: Claude CV point count (this site's photos)
Coral cover: 29% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 10 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

No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.

Comparisons with other data

Reef Check surveyed a station named Reef 1, 2.57 km away. Within 5 km, five Reef Check stations recorded station-year means of 16–60% hard coral cover in 2019; the nearest, Reef Check at Reef 1, 2.57 km away, read a mean of 40% in 2019.

CV model comparison

Mean 29%, median 24% across 10 photos.

More info

A 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 info

DINOv3 and CoralSCOP were run on the site's photographs (see each row's n) 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	too few photos (n=8)
CoralSCOP edited	46.5*	n = 10 · SE 10.2
Claude (edited photos)	29.1*	n = 10 · SE 8.4
Coralscapes v2 (low confidence, never averaged)	33.3*

CoralSCOP (edited photos) reads 46.5%, 17.4 pp above Claude's blind point count (29.1%); the headline stays Claude's blind point count because no transect or manual count exists here.

In-house DINOv3: this method was run on 8 of 10 photos, under the 10 needed for a value, so it is not shown and is left out of any mean; every other row rests on its own photo count.

*Based on only 10 reef-habitat photos; this estimate is less certain.

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

Independent surveys nearby

Within 5 km, 5 independent survey stations recorded hard coral cover in 2019. The most recent nearby survey is from 2019, so these values predate recent heat stress. This site's own estimate (29%) 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
Agency	Site / location	Date	Hard coral cover (%)	Distance
Reef Check	Reef 1	2019	40% (2 surveys)	2.57 km
Reef Check	Wide Reef	2019	40%	3.07 km
Reef Check	Fantastic Reef	2019	45% (2 surveys)	3.52 km
Reef Check	Aquarium Reef	2019	60%	4.69 km
Reef Check	German Island	2019	16% (2 surveys)	4.82 km

Data & links

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