The world’s coral reefs are bigger than we thought – but it took satellites, snorkels and machine learning to see them

By Mitchell Lyons, Postdoctoral research fellow, The University of Queensland
Stuart Phinn, Professor of Geography, Director - Remote Sensing Research Centre, Chair - Earth Observation Australia, The University of Queensland

The world’s coral reefs are close to 25% larger than we thought. By using satellite images, machine learning and on-ground knowledge from a global network of people living and working on coral reefs, we found an extra 64,000 square kilometres of coral reefs – an area the size of Ireland.

That brings the total size of the planet’s shallow reefs (meaning 0-20 metres deep) to 348,000 square kilometres – the size of Germany. This figure represents whole coral reef ecosystems, ranging…

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