### BISA88 — Salomon
**CRD page:** [Salomon Islands Coral Survey April 2015](https://coralreefdiagnostics.com/salomon-201504)

**23 April 2015**
**GPS:** 5.33932°S, 72.23605°E
**Setting:** protected submerged lagoonal patch reef, 14.8 m
**Coral cover:** 56.7% (4 depth transects, D1–D4; **algal cover 34.8%**) · **published image bleaching:** 12.0%
**Live hard coral cover across methods:** formal transects 56.7% · CoralNet points 32.6% · Coralscapes masks 26.4% (13 frames). These products have different sampling footprints and denominators and should not be averaged.
**Temperature:** 30.7 °C · **Salinity:** 34.3
**Photo review:** all 19 stills examined
**Representative photos:** P4230862.jpg, P4230863.jpg, P4230864.jpg, P4230922.jpg, P4230934.jpg

BISA88 is a shallow, protected lagoonal patch reef inside Salomon atoll, and it is **one of the highest-cover sites in the archipelago: 56.7% coral against 34.8% algae, ranking 13th of 109 Chagos sites for coral cover and in the lower half (73rd of 109) for algal cover.** Bare substrate is almost absent at **1.2% (PB)** — the reef is close to fully occupied — with the remaining space split between crustose coralline algae (PCCATS 13.8%, 55th of 109), fleshy turf (PTTS 13.6%, 25th of 109), sediment-filled interstices (PITS 7.3%, PMTS 6.0%) and only 1.2% PTSTS. At **30.7 °C this is also the warmest of the five sites in this batch**, consistent with a shallow, enclosed lagoonal setting.

Coral cover is spread across **32 nonzero genera — the 8th-highest genus richness of the 109 Chagos sites** — and no single taxon dominates. All values below are percent of total benthos, not percent of coral. *Acropora* leads at 10.03% of the benthos (18% of the coral present), but *Montipora* is effectively level at 9.98% (18%), followed by *Porites* 8.16% (14%) and **an unusually high *Lobophyllia* at 8.07% (14%)**; those four alone hold two-thirds of the coral, and adding *Goniopora* (2.67%) brings the top five to 79%. The next tier is *Herpolitha* (2.03%), *Favia* (1.88%), *Favites* (1.63%), *Alveopora* (1.46%), *Halomitra* (1.33%), *Fungia* (1.31%), *Stylophora* (1.23%) and *Goniastrea* (1.14%), then a tail of 20 further genera each under 1% — *Pavona*, *Psammocora*, *Platygyra*, *Turbinaria*, *Galaxea*, *Astreopora*, *Plerogyra*, *Ctenactis*, *Pocillopora*, *Echinopora*, *Pachyseris*, *Physogyra*, *Seriatopora*, *Merulina*, *Podabacia*, *Cyphastrea*, *Millepora*, *Diploastrea* and *Leptastrea*. **The presence of *Herpolitha*, *Halomitra*, *Ctenactis*, *Fungia*, *Alveopora*, *Physogyra* and *Plerogyra* — free-living mushroom corals and soft-tissued lagoonal taxa — is itself a signature of the sheltered, sediment-influenced habitat**, and these genera are scarce or absent at the exposed forereef sites in this batch.

**The four depth transects produce the most striking profile in this batch: the leading genus changes at every single station.** D1, the shallowest, carries 59.0% coral against 35.8% algae and is *Acropora*-dominated — *Acropora* alone at 28.00% of the benthos, **47% of that transect's coral** — ahead of *Lobophyllia* 7.30%, *Favites* 4.30%, *Porites* 3.60%, *Favia* 2.40% and *Turbinaria* 2.30%. At D2 cover rises slightly to 60.7% and algae falls to its profile low of 25.7%, and **the lead passes to *Lobophyllia* at 15.87%** (26% of that transect's coral), with *Goniopora* 7.17%, *Acropora* 6.87%, *Herpolitha* 5.53%, *Porites* 5.47% and *Favia* 3.73%. At D3 cover peaks at **65.3%, the highest of the profile, and the lead passes again — to *Porites* at 19.97%** (31%), with *Montipora* 12.43%, *Lobophyllia* 6.00%, *Acropora* 5.27%, *Goniopora* 3.50% and *Halomitra* 2.83%. Then D4 **drops sharply to 41.9% coral against 47.0% algae and becomes near-monogeneric: *Montipora* alone at 25.30% of the benthos — 60% of all the coral on that transect** — with *Porites* 3.60%, *Lobophyllia* 3.10%, *Galaxea* 2.40%, *Alveopora* 1.70% and *Pavona* 1.20% making up most of the remainder. **The site-level figures of 10.03% *Acropora* and 9.98% *Montipora* describe no single transect**: *Acropora* is nearly three times that value at D1 and a fifth of it at D3–D4, while *Montipora* is negligible at D1–D2 and dominant at D4.

The photographs — all 19 stills in the folder — show a coral-abundant, high-relief patch reef with close-packed branching, massive, lobate and plating colonies, consistent with a site where bare substrate reaches only 1.2%. P4230922 and P4230934 show the dense mixed architecture especially clearly, with numerous crevices and little broad bare pavement; turf- and crust-covered framework occurs between colonies, but much of the photographed substrate is occupied by coral or other sessile organisms. P4230864 and several later views contain conspicuous red-pink colonial organisms among the coral; these are described conservatively because photographs alone do not distinguish all sponge, ascidian and soft-coral candidates. Lobate and massive growth forms are prominent across the set, compatible with the high *Lobophyllia* and *Porites* signals in the transects, but image-based genus assignments remain tentative.

**Condition shows localized but unambiguous bleaching.** The published image-based bleaching figure is **12.0%, ranking 19th of the 98 Chagos sites carrying a value** — the upper fifth for bleaching severity. Bleaching is directly visible in the stills: P4230863 shows a sharply white, fine-branched colony against darker neighbouring substrate, and P4230922 contains several white or markedly pale branching and lobate colonies amid pigmented coral, making exposure or flash artefact an insufficient explanation. Other frames contain lighter colonies and tips; only the clearest observations were entered as frame-specific records. These corroborate localized bleaching without supplying a replacement percentage. No crown-of-thorns starfish or diagnostic disease sign was identified in the 19 stills, and no discrete tissue-loss front was confidently separated from bleaching, old mortality or lighting effects.

Small reef fishes occur throughout the dense coral framework. These are qualitative observations from a non-standardized photographic set and no large-animal event is inferred.

<b>Assemblage composition.</b> Formal transects give 56.7% coral against 34.8% algae on a reef with almost no bare substrate (1.2%), across 32 nonzero genera — 8th-highest richness of 109 sites — led by *Acropora* (10.0%), *Montipora* (10.0%), *Porites* (8.2%) and an unusually high *Lobophyllia* (8.1%), with free-living mushroom corals and soft-tissued lagoonal taxa forming a distinctive sheltered-habitat signature. The four-transect depth profile changes leading genus at every station — *Acropora* at D1, *Lobophyllia* at D2, *Porites* at D3 where cover peaks at 65.3%, and *Montipora* holding 60% of the coral at D4 where cover falls to 41.9%. The photographs document the matching dense, high-relief mixed architecture, and give direct frame-level evidence of localized bleaching consistent with the published 12.0%.

**Flags:** (1) **The genus percentages sum to 56.61%, against a published site cover of 56.74% — a 0.13 pp shortfall.** Every other site in this batch matches exactly, so this small gap is unexplained; it is well within rounding of the individual columns but is recorded rather than silently reconciled. (2) **Exposure is blank for this site in `BIOT-1-MASTER-WkBk.xlsx`, sheet `Master`**; the header's "protected" comes from `exposure_published` in `CHAGOS_SITE_REFERENCE_20260825.csv`, used as a documented fallback. No exposure class was invented. (3) **Multi-method deviation is large.** CoralNet points (32.6%) and Coralscapes masks (26.4%) sit 24–30 percentage points below the formal-transect figure (56.7%, deviation range −30.3 to −24.1 pp). Do not average the three figures; the transect value is treated as ground truth for cover. (4) **The CV figures rest on a 13-frame scored subset**, not the 19 stills reviewed here — never print the folder frame-count beside a CoralNet/Coralscapes value. (5) **The CoralNet points figure is a CV product, not verified ground truth**; point-annotation data corpus-wide is roughly 76% unconfirmed machine output. (6) **Formal replication is thin: `N Rows` = 4** for the site-level figures, and the published `formal vs. informal comparison` sheet records **13** rows for the bleaching comparison — a different basis from the 19 website stills reviewed here. (7) **Any rank off the `Mean(%bleaching)` column is approximate** — that column carries at least one known bad value (BITB58 listed at 22.22% against a corrected 0.77%). (8) **The depth codes D1–D4 carry no metre boundaries** in `Chagos benthic data by site-depth (n=336 rows).csv`; they are ordered shallow-to-deep stations, and the 14.8 m in the header is the site-level survey depth, not the depth of any one transect. (9) **Red-pink colonial organisms in P4230864 and later frames are not identified to group** — sponge, ascidian and soft-coral candidates cannot be separated from these photographs, and they are excluded from the scleractinian figures. (10) **No COTS, disease, or predation scarring was observed** across the full 19-frame review — an explicit absence-of-evidence finding. (11) **The published bleaching figure is a COMPUTER-VISION product, not an in-situ observation.** It comes from CoralNet annotation of the informal survey images (Mayfield & Dempsey 2026, *Oceans*). Per-image human-vs-model agreement is substantially weaker for bleaching than for cover: r = 0.40 for bleached against r = 0.72 for live hard coral (`CHAGOS_MULTIMETHOD_README.md`). Treat the site bleaching percentage as the weaker of the two published numbers, and never read it as a diver's field estimate.

**Benthic data:** [Download BISA88 benthic survey data (CSV)](../benthic_data/BISA88_benthic.csv) — scleractinian cover by genus with full names, plus substrate and algal categories, from the LOF BIOT-1 survey (Mayfield & Dempsey 2026, *Oceans*, supplemental file S1).