The landscape
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The Great Barrier Reef is listed under all four natural World Heritage criteria for its outstanding universal value and is located off the coast of Queensland, Australia. The Great Barrier Reef is a huge 345,000 square kilometers in size, which is equivalent to five times the size of Tasmania or larger that the United Kingdom and Ireland combined!
The reef is immensely diverse and is home to more than 1,500 species of fish, 411 types of hard coral, one-third of the world’s soft corals, 134 species of sharks and rays, six of the world’s seven species of threatened marine turtles, and more than 30 species of marine mammals, including the vulnerable dugong
There are as many as 3,000 mollusks and thousands of different sponges, worms and crustaceans, 630 species of echinoderms (starfish and sea urchins) and 215 bird species, of which 22 are seabirds.