Coral Health Surveys at Lord Howe Island During 2010-2012 Bleaching Events

Coral health surveys quantified the response of approximately 42,000 coral colonies to successive marine heatwaves between March 2010 and September 2012. The data document bleaching severity, tissue mortality, and recovery across taxa like Pocillopora and Acropora, alongside shifts in benthic community composition.

Use Cases

• Analyze bleaching severity percentages across different reef sites and depths to model thermal stress impacts.
• Compare tissue mortality and recovery timelines across coral taxa such as Pocillopora, Stylophora, Porites, and Montipora.
• Model shifts from coral-dominated to macroalgae-dominated assemblages using repeated survey data before, during, and after heatwaves.
• Assess the resilience of high-latitude coral taxa like merulinid and Acropora species to successive thermal anomalies.

Strengths

• Documents a specific, high-impact event: successive marine heatwaves during a fast El Niño to La Niña transition.
• Based on surveys of approximately 42,000 individual coral colonies, providing a substantial observational basis.
• Includes temporal data across multiple survey points from March 2010 to September 2012, capturing pre-event, event, and recovery phases.

Limitations

• Geographic scope is limited to high-latitude reefs around Lord Howe Island, limiting generalizability to other reef systems.
• Data format is HTML, not a structured table, which may require significant extraction and parsing effort for analysis.
• Sample data and column definitions are unavailable, obscuring the exact structure and variables recorded.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia Data, derived from a published study in Science of The Total Environment (2020).

Collection Method

Coral health surveys conducted in the field quantifying bleaching, mortality, and community composition.

Time Range

March 2010 to September 2012.

Freshness

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Geography

Coral reef assemblages around Lord Howe Island.