PADI Distinctive Specialty · by CoralWatch, The University of Queensland
CoralWatch Coral Health Chart
What a coral is, and how pale it has become. Match a colony's color against the chart, in the water — lightest area, darkest area, growth form — record at least twenty, and upload them to a database shared with reefs around the world. Simple, non-invasive, and the first course in the pathway.
Whose course this is
Not mine — and that is the point.
This specialty was written by CoralWatch, a non-profit citizen-science program built on a research project at The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and it is taught under their written permission with PADI's instructor authorization. The chart itself comes from University of Queensland experiments relating coral color to the concentration of symbiotic algae — the color steps on it are stages of bleaching and recovery — and the data goes into CoralWatch's global database, where it sits alongside the same measurement from reefs around the world.
None of the four measurement courses that follow stops to teach what a coral actually is, how it bleaches, or how to read its condition. CoralWatch already does that well, so it opens the pathway rather than being reinvented inside it. Every Reef Chronicler station later points back to a CoralWatch survey as its condition record.
What you learn
Two knowledge sessions, two dives, one upload
Corals and bleaching
What corals are and why reefs matter; the threats they face; why color is an indicator of health and what bleaching actually is — the coral expelling its symbiotic algae until the white skeleton shows through transparent tissue.
The survey, and the data
The four coral types the chart uses — branching, boulder, plate, soft — how to run a survey, what not to monitor, what else to record (depth, water temperature, weather), and how to enter the results at coralwatch.org.
Chart against colony
Choose a coral, find its lightest area, rotate the chart to the closest match and record the code; do the same for its darkest area; record the coral type; continue to at least twenty colonies. Below about 5 m a dive light goes on both the chart and the coral, because water takes the reds first.
Submit it
Being part of the whole survey — monitoring, recording and reporting — is a certification requirement. The data is entered online, as a group or through your own free CoralWatch account, and joins the global record.
Before the course
Prerequisites & standards
Required
- PADI (Junior) Open Water Diver, or a qualifying certification.
- At least 10 years old. For 10- and 11-year-olds the maximum depth is 12 m (40 ft).
- A Coral Health Chart and an underwater slate with pencil, plus a dive light for surveys below 5 m (15 ft).
Standards
- Two open water dives, maximum 18 m (60 ft). No confined water session is required.
- Student-to-instructor ratio 8:1; 4:1 where 10- and 11-year-olds are diving.
- Counts as one specialty toward PADI Master Scuba Diver, and is the first of the five for Master Reef Science Diver.
The CoralWatch Coral Health Chart Distinctive Specialty is authored by CoralWatch (© CoralWatch 2021; C. Roelfsema and D. Kleine) and is not a scoooba course. Its materials — the instructor guide, presentations, practice survey and knowledge review — are CoralWatch's, so they are not published as lessons on this site. The method itself is open to anyone at coralwatch.org.
Start here.
An Open Water card and a chart are all it takes — and it is the first step toward measuring a reef, not just looking at one.