A colorful, coral-covered reef slope with schooling fish at Pulau Sebatang, Halmahera, Indonesia — Pulau Sebatang, Halmahera, Indonesia

Web Resources I Recommend

Coral reef courses, databases, maps, and tools I think are worth your time. For the complete list of all coral reef agencies, please consult our “Coral Health Map.”

1. Basic coral reef biology & ecology

Living Oceans Foundation education portal — free marine-biology lessons and curriculum with a focus on coral reefs
Thriving Corals — “The Underwater World: Marine Biology” course
University of Queensland / WWF coral reef course on edX
Reef Resilience Network courses — free, self-paced coral reef courses on Conservation Training
Coral Restoration Foundation activity packs — free, downloadable classroom activities about corals
Guide to Miami’s Coral Reefs (thanks to Leah and Alice for the recommendation!)

Coral anatomy: still from the Living Oceans Foundation video “What are Corals?” (click to watch on YouTube) — Coral anatomy videos from the Living Oceans Foundation: What are Corals?, Coral: What is it?, and How Corals Eat: Coral Polyps Feeding

2. Coral reef data

Reef Check — worldwide reef surveys by trained volunteer divers (survey data since 1997 can be viewed for free on Aqualink)
Atlantic and Gulf Rapid Reef Assessment (AGRRA) — standardized surveys of Caribbean and Gulf reefs
AIMS Long-Term Monitoring Program — coral cover and fish trends on the Great Barrier Reef
NOAA National Coral Reef Monitoring Program — long-term monitoring of U.S. reefs
Coral Traits Database — species-level trait observations for reef corals
Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) — global marine species-occurrence records
Corals of the World — Veron’s global coral taxonomy database
Healthy Reefs Initiative — report cards for the Mesoamerican Reef
Catlin Seaview Survey — 360° panoramic reef imagery
MERMAID — a platform for sharing coral reef monitoring data (most are closed-access)
Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) — regional and global status-of-reefs reports (>90% of data are closed-access)

3. Water quality

NOAA Coral Reef Watch — satellite sea-surface temperature, degree heating weeks, and bleaching alerts
Argo Program — global ocean temperature and salinity profiles from floats
Bio-ORACLE — global layers of ocean temperature, salinity, nutrients, and light, present-day and future (used in our maps)
Aqualink — heat-stress dashboards and live temperature, wave, and wind data from reef sensors

4. Coral reef maps

The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation produced detailed maps for many of the never-before-seen reefs we had the good fortune to dive during the “Global Reef Expedition,” and they keep adding data layers to those maps here: maps.lof.org/lof/.

Allen Coral Atlas — satellite-based benthic and geomorphic maps of the world’s shallow coral reefs
UNEP-WCMC Ocean+ Habitats — global coral reef distribution and habitat extent by country (a source for our own maps)
Mapping Ocean Wealth — The Nature Conservancy’s maps of what reefs are worth to people
Coastal Resilience — The Nature Conservancy’s mapping tools, including the Caribbean reef explorer

5. Restoration & advanced topics

Coral reef restoration course — from the Coral Restoration Consortium and The Nature Conservancy’s Reef Resilience Network
Coral Restoration Consortium — the global community of practice for coral restoration
International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI) and its Coral Bleaching Hub
NOAA coral disease ID cards — printable field cards for identifying coral diseases
CoralNet — AI-assisted analysis of benthic survey photos
Reef Adapt — conservation genetic planning for reefs
Citizen science: CoralWatch, Great Reef Census, Eyes of the Reef Hawaiʻi, and eOceans

COral Taxonomy

I cross-referenced presence-absence data from Corals of the World with records from Coral Traits, WoRld register of marine species (WORMS), the primary literature (a 37,000-PDF LLM), and my own data. Note that, since much of the taxonomy is in a state of flux, the species descriptions contain notes that indicate when a species name has been updated in recent years.