MERMAID is a free web platform to collect, manage and analyze data on coral reef ecosystems. MERMAID helps scientists, reef managers, communities, and governments quickly assess and track changes on coral reefs to monitor existing conservation efforts or identify new areas as conservation priorities.
MERMAID is actively developed by the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the geospatial consultancy Sparkgeo. It is continuously updated based on the knowledge, input, and needs of experts and stakeholders working directly with coral reef monitoring. MERMAID is an open-source application and all development code is available on GitHub.
MERMAID is free and can be used by anyone who collects coral reef data or wants to visualize coral reef status and trends around the world. Over 2,000 people from 70 organizations currently use MERMAID - see more on the MERMAID Dashboard.
MERMAID supports benthic surveys (line intercept transect, point intercept transect, photo quadrat), fish surveys (belt transect), bleaching surveys (quadrat), and habitat complexity surveys (tape-and-chain). We are currently exploring options to support an invertebrate survey and standard point counts for reef fish. Have another survey you'd like to see us add? Please reach out.
Yes. MERMAID is an online/offline platform and you can collect data completely offline in the field without an internet connection. Before going offline, make sure to setup your project, add users and test the offline functionality. You can also download a PDF of our help files when offline. Check out our documentation to find out more.
MERMAID ensures that your data are safely stored, backed up and encrypted. Our cloud infrastructure is hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the world's most robust infrastructures and maintains the highest standards of data protection and privacy. Read more in our Terms of Service.
Users control all decisions about data access and sharing to their projects on MERMAID. Data sharing choices in a project can only be made by project users with an 'Admin' role, and raw data can be viewed only by users within each project. There are three types of user roles with different permissions: Admin, Collector, and Read-only. Learn more about user roles and data sharing choices in the MERMAID documentation.
Users retain full ownership and control rights over their data and can choose whether to share it with the broader community. If you don't want to share any summaries or raw observations, you can choose the 'Private' data sharing options.
MERMAID enhances data standardization and validation to ensure consistency in data analysis and reporting. After users conduct surveys and enter observations into MERMAID , a series of QA/QC checks are performed automatically to catch common errors or typos. These checks are then validated by users before data are submitted, ensuring data reliability.
There are many stories of MERMAID's impact, we hope yours can be next!
In the Persian Gulf, Dr. Jeneen Hadj-Hammou and her team at NYU Abu Dhabi used MERMAID to compile historical coral reef data from seven countries, enhancing collaboration, improving data accuracy through QA/QC processes, and saving time with automatic fish biomass calculations.
Rare's Fish Forever program transformed 'a nightmare' of data management by implementing MERMAID, leading to better conservation outcomes and community engagement.
In Mozambique, WCS has shared MERMAID with national coral reef partners to visualize coral reef metrics quickly on the MERMAID dashboad, driving effective conservation efforts and inspiring broader public engagement.