Coral bleaching and mass mortality at Lizard Island revealed by drone imagery
Raoult, Vincent, Joyce, Karen, Li, Joan Y.Q., Roff, George, Carlin, Geoffrey, and Williamson, Jane E. (2025) Coral bleaching and mass mortality at Lizard Island revealed by drone imagery. Coral Reefs. (In Press)
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Abstract
Quantitatively assessing mortality post coral bleaching at scale is inherently difficult, yet can be achieved with georeferenced imagery from aerial drones. Here, we assess the coral bleaching mortality rate from the 2024 global bleaching event at the iconic Lizard Island, Australia. Using drone-derived orthomosaics of the northern and southern sides of the island collected during and after the bleaching event, we measured the area of bleached coral and the area of live coral remaining after bleaching. Across twenty 10 × 10 m quadrats, mean bleaching mortality was 92.2 ± 6.8%, with bleaching affecting 96.92 ± 2.03% SD of living coral cover (mean, SD) of quadrat areas. This is one of the highest rates of bleaching mortality ever recorded, despite corals at Lizard Island being exposed to lower levels of cumulative heat stress than others in many parts of the Great Barrier Reef during this bleaching event.
| Item ID: | 88636 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1432-0975 |
| Keywords: | Climate change, Coral bleaching, Drone, Mortality, Remote sensing, UAV |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Date Deposited: | 05 Jun 2026 00:47 |
| FoR Codes: | 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310305 Marine and estuarine ecology (incl. marine ichthyology) @ 100% |
| SEO Codes: | 18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1805 Marine systems and management > 180504 Marine biodiversity @ 100% |
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