Report from the field! On World Oceans Day (June 8, 2019), MERMAID Beta was officially launched to the world. Here’s what one of our field users had to say about it.
Dr Sangeeta Mangubhai is the Director of the WCS Fiji program, a Pew Fellow, and recipient of the World Reef Award from the International Society of Reef Studies.
Dear Fijian Colleagues,
On World Oceans Day, WCS, WWF and SparkGeo launched a new data platform called MERMAID (Marine Ecological Research Management AID).
It was tested in Fiji with scientists from Ministry of Fisheries, WWF and WCS and our field teams love it and its FREE!
It is simple, easy to use and basically helps those doing coral reef monitoring (including of bleaching) handle data better and quicker, so that we can instantly from data collection to results we can use. It literally calculates coral cover and fish biomass (and other indicators), as you enter the data! So if you are working at a site/village, as soon as data is entered you will know (without doing a single pivot table) your results, and can share them instantly with the communities or stakeholders you are working with. MERMAID allows us to quickly pool data and do national level analyses if we wanted to.
And there are PRIVACY settings, so that only you and your staff can see and access the data, though we are hoping that people might be open to the option of sharing summaries more publicly.
Please let me know if there are others out there who collect coral reef data that might be interested in this.
Once you have had a time to look, please let Yashika, Emily and I know if you are interested in using MERMAID within your organisation. If you have the time to drop by our office, Yashika will be more than willing to give you a demonstration and show you why all of us are addicted to MERMAID. Dr Emily Darling who help fundraise co-led this initiative is also available for any questions.
Regards,
Sangeeta