Two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef showed the largest amount of coral cover in 36 years, according to an official long-term monitoring programme but the reef remains vulnerable to increasingly frequent mass bleaching.
The recovery in the central and northern stretches of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization or 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 on Thursday.
