Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation
Providing science-based solutions to protect and restore ocean health
One sign of a recovering reef is coral recruitment, and thankfully it was abundant during the field surveys in Beqa Lagoon. On the fringing reef surrounding Rukua village, hundreds of small branching and boulder corals can be seen successfully growing …
The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation recently published our findings on the health and resilience of the coral reefs in the Kingdom of Tonga. The report includes a unique grading scale we developed to indicate the relative health and resilience of the reef. For each survey site we visited in Tonga, we assessed the benthic community and classified the reef as being in “good,” moderate,” or “poor” condition.
This assessment was based on the overall live coral cover, algae, and invertebrate composition of the reef.
On our Global Reef Expedition mission to French Polynesia, we had the chance to study many remote coral reefs, some of which had never been surveyed by scientists before. But of all the reefs we surveyed in French Polynesia, the …
