Lyons, Mitchell B., Murray, Nicholas J., Kennedy, Emma V., Kovacs, Eva M., Castro-Sanguino, Carolina, Phinn, Stuart R., Acevedo, Rodney Borrego, Alvarez, Alexandra Ordoñez, Say, Chantel, Tudman, Paul, Markey, Kathryn, Roe, Meredith, Canto, Robert F., Fox, Helen E., Bambic, Brianna, Lieb, Zoë, Asner, Gregory P., Martin, Paulina M., Knapp, David E., Li, Jiwei, Skone, Matthew, Goldenberg, Eldan, Larsen, Kirk, and Roelfsema, Chris M. (2024) New global area estimates for coral reefs from high-resolution mapping. Cell Reports Sustainability, 1 (2). 100015.

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Abstract

Coral reefs underpin the environmental, social, and economic fabrics of much of the world's tropical coast. Yet, the fine-scale distribution and composition of coral reefs have never been reported consistently across the planet. Here, we present new area estimates enabled by global geomorphic zone and benthic substrate maps at 5 m pixel resolution. We revise global coral reef estimates to 348,361 km² of shallow coral reefs and 80,213 km² (46,237–106,319 km², 95% confidence interval) of coral habitat. The mapping used more than 1.5 million training samples supported by 480+ data contributions to deploy a coral reef classification of over 100 trillion pixels from the Sentinel-2 satellites and the Planet Dove CubeSat constellation. The publicly available maps are accessible via the Allen Coral Atlas and Google Earth Engine and are already being used by thousands of people to improve the conservation, management, and research of coral reef ecosystems.

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