Status of coral reefs in the Fiji Islands: part 1; reef health across the Fiji islands

In 2000, the Fiji Islands was at the northern edge of a large pool of unusually warm water, and suffered extensive hard coral death due to coral bleaching. A paper composed of a collection of studies from across the Fiji islands, linking this coral death to elevated sea temperatures at the time, was published (Cummings et al 2000). The difficulty of gathering data from very different sources, and which had been recorded using many different methods, established the need for standardised and regular surveys of representative sites across the Fijian archipelago, in order to measure long-term changes affecting the entire country.