Taiwan

Taiwan lies well north of the main reef belt, but Spalding et al. (2001) record well-developed coral communities along its southern coast and around its offshore islands, sustained by the Kuroshio Current, whose influence weakens in winter under the Northeast Monsoon. About 300 hard coral species and 1,200 fish species are recorded for the island. Well-known mainland reefs include the fringing communities of the Hengchun Peninsula and Kenting National Park, established in 1982, broken into a discontinuous chain by sand channels and varying markedly in fauna from place to place, with some areas dominated by alcyonarians; about 250 scleractinian species in 58 genera have been recorded there. Hsiao-Liu-Chiu has diverse fringing reefs, and the volcanic islands of Lan-Yu and Lu-Tao off the east coast sit in the path of the Kuroshio. The atlas estimates about 940 km² of coral reef for Taiwan as a whole. Dongsha is treated separately, in a section shared with the Spratly and Paracel Islands: a large submerged atoll in the northern South China Sea carrying a single island, with more than 70 coral species recorded, sovereignty disputed between China and Taiwan, and no separate reef-area estimate given.

This page covers 14 sites in two regional groups. Taiwan (mainland + offshore islands) holds eight: the Kenting/Nanwan coast at the island's southern tip, Hsiao Liouchiou off the southwest, and Green Island and five Lanyu (Orchid Island) sites off the southeast. Taiwan - Dongsha holds six: a regional atoll marker, four numbered research stations, and two dives on 6 April 2016 at a site whose position was not recorded. The two are a single page only because they are both Anderson's Taiwanese fieldwork; biogeographically they are not one system, and the classic account keeps them apart. The record is thin and of two kinds. The mainland and offshore-island sites are almost entirely dive logs from 2008 to 2011, with photographs at only one site, and no coral cover was measured anywhere in that group. The Dongsha sites are Dongsha Atoll Research Station work photographed on 4-6 April 2016, where pocilloporid corals were sampled in the search for heat-tolerant genotypes, and three of the four stations carry a value. Recorded maximum depths in the mainland group ran from 13.7 m at Green Island to 35.1 m at Yeyou on Lanyu; at Dongsha, Anderson's sample sheets give maximum dive depths of 4.0-12.8 m.

The Kenting/Nanwan record is the densest part of the record: a regional marker covering more than fifty logged dives from 3.7 m to 33.5 m between February 2008 and July 2011. They support Anderson's work comparing Seriatopora hystrix at cold-upwelling Houbihu with non-upwelling Houwan, and include collections of Seriatopora, Pocillopora damicornis, and Stylophora pistillata, a coral-spawning night dive, dives in a power-plant thermal outlet at roughly 30°C, and a dive near a sewage outfall where coral was overgrown by algae. Its photographs show a branching Acropora thicket at the edge of a silt-sand plain, a densely covered but turbid slope of stacked plating colonies with a large brain coral, and a steep plating wall hung with feather stars. Murky water is a recurring complaint in the logs. The offshore islands read very differently: four August 2008 dives at Green Island logged visibility of more than 45 m ('150 ft-plus'), soft coral meadows and '1,000 year old Porites colonies'; the Lanyu dives logged a 20 m ledge of high coral diversity with sea snakes at Yeyou, a fish-filled cavern and tunnel system at Blue Hole, coral caverns and 50 m visibility at Hen's Rock, and abundant hard coral south of Twin Lion Rocks.

Dongsha is the only place on this page with measured numbers: blind Claude computer-vision point counts of 57% at Site 6, 54% at Site 13, 30% at Site 7, and 24% on the 6 April dives, from Anderson's photographs rather than transects. The stations are structurally varied. Site 13 is a vast, low bank of yellow-green to olive finger-form coral running to the limit of visibility, with giant massive Porites-type domes, one mushroom-shaped and deeply undercut, and tiered plate-coral pinnacles standing 2-3 m clear of the reef. Site 6 is a high-relief, near wall-to-wall hard coral reef of branching and tabular Acropora, meter-wide Porites domes, brain corals, red sea fans, and broad foliose plate fields, while the 6 April dives, at a position not recorded, found a lower, more turbid flat carpeted with hundreds of leathery soft corals. Site 7 is a mosaic of dense living coral banks separated by broad stretches of older, turf-coated dead rubble and pavement, and Site 12 is a field of thin, tiered foliose plates, most of them dead and silt-coated (the field sheet: mostly Echinopora rubble, low live cover), broken by a dense branching thicket.

The condition signal in the Dongsha frames is paling rather than anything sharper. Anderson's sample sheet records seven of the eight colonies sampled at Site 7 as healthy (one lightly pigmented) and, of the twelve at Site 13, one as about 20% bleached and another with 20% recent mortality; at Site 6 the sample sheet records storm damage and old partial mortality among the eight colonies sampled; and at Site 12 most of the foliose plates are dead and silt-coated (the field sheet: mostly Echinopora rubble, low live cover). No crown-of-thorns starfish, Drupella aggregations, or disease fronts were seen at Sites 6, 7 or 13, but derelict monofilament line was found on a Porites-type colony at Site 13, alongside one patch of recent tissue loss. On the mainland the recorded pressures are human and specific, from the Kenting log: coral overgrown by algae beside a sewage outfall, dives in a power-plant thermal outlet, and 2009 typhoon destruction of branching acroporids. Nearby Reef Check stations show how variable the setting is, from 46-67% hard coral within 2 km of Hen's Rock to 43-51% at Lion Couple Rock South, where the Twin Lion Rocks pin sits, and 18-22% near Houbihu in 2024-2025. Wilkinson (2006) found reefs near dense human activity in East and North Asia still declining while remote reefs recovered from 1998, and Souter et al. (2021), who do not report Taiwan's trends separately, list Taiwan among the places hit by severe bleaching in 2020.