Australian Institute of Marine Science

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Australia's tropical marine research agency, whose Long-Term Monitoring Program has surveyed a fixed set of Great Barrier Reef sites annually since 1985 using manta-tow surveys for broad-scale cover and fixed photo transects for detail. The programme is the reason the Great Barrier Reef has something most reef systems lack: a consistent, single-method record of coral cover spanning four decades, against which a claim about decline or recovery can actually be tested. That record has produced results in both directions and both are instructive. It supported the 2012 finding that coral cover had roughly halved over twenty-seven years; it also recorded record-high cover on parts of the reef in the early 2020s, driven by rapid regrowth of fast-growing Acropora — the same genus most vulnerable to the next bleaching event. A long series is what allows a reader to distinguish a trend from the last thing that happened.