Parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef show highest coral cover in 36 years
Two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef showed the largest amount of coral cover in 36 years, but the reef remains vulnerable to increasingly frequent
Two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef showed the largest amount of coral cover in 36 years, but the reef remains vulnerable to increasingly frequent mass bleaching, an official long-term monitoring program reported on Thursday.
The recovery in the central and northern stretches of the UNESCO world heritage-listed reef contrasted with the southern region, where there was a loss of coral cover due to crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks, the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) said in its annual report.
“What we’re seeing is that the Great Barrier Reef is still a resilient system. It still maintains that ability to recover from disturbances,” AIMS monitoring program leader Mike Emslie told Reuters.
“But the worrying thing is that the frequency of these disturbance events are increasing, particularly the mass coral bleaching events,” he said.
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