Taiwan - Dongsha / Pratas Atoll (South China Sea)

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Part of the regional summaries: Taiwan - Dongsha and Taiwan

Photo: Anderson Mayfield/Coral Reef Diagnostics

Country

Taiwan

Survey date(s)

2016-04-04
2016-04-05
2016-04-06

Coordinates

20.7000, 116.7200

Approximate position.

Coral cover

not reported

Too few images to estimate coral cover.

Observations

None tagged; see Stressors below

Heat stress

Most recent heat load record

28.4°C 2.9°C-weeks

26 Oct 2026 · Bleaching Watch

5-year thermal stress load

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

13.6°C-weeksⁱ

2021–2025

NOAA Coral Reef Watch — Dongsha, Taiwan 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

Dongsha, Taiwan (NOAA CRW virtual station)

Photographs

Site summary

Read this summary in:

Dongsha (Pratas) Atoll is a bleaching-resilience study site, where Anderson sampled pocilloporid corals in April 2016 to look for heat-tolerant genotypes. Photographs show two contrasting faces — an unbroken, healthy-looking staghorn Acropora field and a softer lagoon pavement of lobed and mushroom soft corals with scattered hard coral bommies — with no bleaching visible in either; no coral-cover figure is published for this site.

Sea surface temp. (satellite)

25.7°C
mean; range 25.5–26.0°C

satellite sea surface temperature (SST), mean of the 3 survey dates (NOAA Coral Reef Watch, Dongsha, Taiwan), 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

One other CRD dive site with its own page within 5 km shown in orange — click a marker to open its page.

Site description

Setting

Dongsha (Pratas) Atoll sits roughly 450 km southwest of Taiwan in the open South China Sea. It is a bleaching-resilience study site: Anderson sampled pocilloporid corals here in April 2016 to look for heat-tolerant genotypes.

General benthic features

Anderson's frames show two very different faces of the atoll. One is a monospecific-looking staghorn Acropora field running unbroken to the limit of visibility, its branch tips still pale-tipped and healthy, with clouds of blue-green chromis hanging over the canopy (e.g., Image 2).

The other is the atoll's soft-coral character: broad lagoon-floor pavement studded with lobed and mushroom-shaped leathery soft corals in green, gray, and mauve, interspersed with low bushy hard corals, encrusting and knobby colonies, and one clean yellow table Acropora perhaps a meter across (e.g., Image 1, Image 3).

The substrate between colonies is consolidated rubble and turf rather than sand.

Coral cover

No coral-cover figure is published for this site; the photographs are a site record, not a survey.
Nothing on the map attaches a coral-cover measurement to this site — the account above is descriptive background, not a survey result.

Stressors

No bleaching is visible in the reviewed frames. No crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) or other corallivores were evident.

Comparisons with other data

Tkachenko & Soong (2017) surveyed this site (Dongsha Atoll). If you have survey data from this site to share, please email us.

Other notes

A dedicated Dongsha gallery and project write-up sits at coralreefdiagnostics.com/dongsha-atoll-1.

Data & links

All images from Coral Reef Diagnostics.

References

Tkachenko KS, Soong K (2017). Dongsha Atoll: A potential thermal refuge for reef-building corals in the South China Sea. Marine Environmental Research 127:112-125. DOI