MERMAID is a free cloud-based platform to collect, visualize, 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 a free, open platform for anyone collecting or using coral reef data. Researchers, NGOs, governments, and community groups worldwide use MERMAID to record, analyze, and visualize coral reef status and trends. More than 3,000 users from 180 organizations are already part of the MERMAID community — explore their work on MERMAID Explore.
MERMAID supports benthic surveys (line intercept transect, point intercept transect, photo quadrat transect), fish surveys (belt transect), bleaching surveys (rapid assessment using quadrats), and habitat complexity surveys (visual scoring). We are currently implementing a macroinvertebrate survey. 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 includes a beta AI model for coral reef image classification in the Collect app. Simply drag and drop your photos, and the model will automatically identify major benthic groups and coral genera within the photo quadrats. No setup, model training, or label creation required — everything works seamlessly out of the box.
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.
MERMAID uses AI responsibly by prioritizing transparency, collaboration, and sustainability. Rather than having every user train their own model — a process that consumes large amounts of energy and computing power, MERMAID develops shared, open AI models that benefit the entire community. Each model is built from anonymized and verified reef images and annotations contributed through MERMAID, ensuring privacy, fairness, and global representation. We openly share our training data and model documentation to promote accountability and reproducibility, and users always retain full control of their data—no private or sensitive information is ever used for model training. By developing shared generalized models, we reduce duplication, significantly lower the environmental footprint of AI development, and make advanced coral reef image analysis accessible to everyone.
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 MERMAID Explore, driving effective conservation efforts and inspiring broader public engagement.