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← All lessons Lesson 17 of 19 · 2 min

Reporting Rules That Are Easiest to Break

Report all three uncertainties, not the smallest. A cover figure has sampling error, which is calculated; scorer disagreement, which is measured; and capture repeatability, which comes off Dive 3. The last is usually the largest. Reporting only the first understates what you know by the largest of the three.

Condition is never a cover class. A point on bleached tissue is scored hard coral, with bleached attached to it. If bleached were a class of its own, a bleaching event would appear in the record as a fall in coral cover — which is false. Bleached coral is still coral, still occupying the same substrate, and it may recover.

Indeterminate is an answer. Where a frame cannot support the call — most often between bleached tissue and recently dead skeleton, which are both white — record it as indeterminate. Never assign it to whichever seems likelier. An honest unknown is data; a guess is not.

Record a lesion, never name a disease. "White band-like lesion at the colony margin, photographed, position recorded" is useful, and a specialist can act on it. "White band disease" is a claim the photograph cannot support, and once it is in a record it gets read by people who cannot check it against the animal.

The raw file is the record. Processed and exported images are derivatives. Your camera's processing makes decisions to produce an attractive picture rather than a faithful one, and those decisions are neither recorded nor reversible.

Condition figures are area-based, not colony prevalence. Points sample area, so one large bleached colony outweighs thirty small healthy ones. Much published monitoring reports the other thing. Say which you are reporting.

Nothing above Level 3. Every statement beyond a measured value carries a level: what you measured, what a cited source says, or what a cited source plus a stated assumption suggests. This reef is degraded is a diagnosis from one visit and does not appear in your Entry.

Quick check

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Generated from the Reef Chronicler Student Handbook, version 0.04. The course documents are the authority; if these pages and they ever disagree, the documents are right.