Coral reefs are larger than expected: those in shallow water cover a total area of 348,000 square kilometers. This is demonstrated by the satellite images collected as part of the Allen Coral Atlas project.
The study, published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability, will help to better plan conservation strategies for these ecosystems increasingly threatened by man and climate change. To create a high-resolution global coral map, researchers used more than 1.5 million samples and 100 trillion pixels from the Sentinel-2 and Planet Dove CubeSat satellites.