When George Stoyle first started working at Rare in 2017, data management was patchy at best. “Everyone was using Excel spreadsheets and there was no standardization. When it came to doing anything with the data – compiling it, writing reports – it was a nightmare.”
In those days, whoever was tasked with writing reports would get “bombarded” with non-standardized, non-validated data – a jumble of inconsistent species names and various other data points to untangle. This approach was not only inconvenient, but also wasteful. As George recalls, “a lot of data got lost.”
“This seems to tick all the boxes”
George’s first job was to find a solution for these issues. “I was looking for a way to centralize all the data,” he says, “make it cloud-based and get everyone using the same systems, pre-validating as much as possible, so we could get clean data on submission; and trying to get everyone to use the same systems to actually input the data.”
Drawing on his experience as a web developer, he initially created a mobile app to collect survey data, but this proved to be incompatible with field work and didn’t catch on with researchers. “They didn’t want to fiddle around with a mobile app so I thought about developing a similar web-based system” he says. The eureka moment came when George discovered MERMAID.
“And then we found out about MERMAID and we thought ‘a-ha!’ – this seems to tick all those boxes,” says George. “Not only is it a standardized way for our teams to input data, it also allowed us to share that data with others.” MERMAID opened up new possibilities for Rare research teams, both in terms of the scale and communicative impact of their work. As George puts it, MERMAID allowed them to “start looking at data on a much wider area and start answering much bigger questions.”
“Even easier to use than a spreadsheet”
George saw an immediate benefit after implementing MERMAID, especially when Rare needed to prepare and submit a comprehensive report to a donor. This report established baseline fish biomass data (kilograms per hectare) in Mozambique – a process involving various groups of people representing different organizations and conducting surveys across a large area. Standardization of data management was therefore essential to success.
“We got the contractors to use MERMAID for data entry,” says George, who insisted every contributor followed the same protocols in a bid to ensure standardization. For researchers who are wedded to their old ways, this can be a challenge. As George explains, “people still want to use Excel,” but once they get past the initial changeover to MERMAID, “they see how easy it is. I’d say it’s even easier to use than a spreadsheet.”
Calculating biomass for such a large area was one of the many benefits offered by MERMAID on George’s Mozambique surveys. “Ordinarily, that would have taken much longer, but because the biomass calculations are already done [in the MERMAID Collect app], all you need to do is download the spreadsheets and you can pull the figures very easily,” he explains. “That saved a lot of time – I would say many hours, probably days.”
MERMAID & Rare: The Data
Projects
Years
Countries
Ha of managed access areas
Fishers
Small-scale fishing communities
“A huge incentive for communities”
Rare works with municipal governments to set up ‘managed access areas’, places where people living in local communities are granted exclusive rights to fishing. Within that area, they set up no-take reserves which help replenish the surrounding waters. The process of establishing and monitoring these areas takes time, and lots of data. Rare teams conduct extensive dive surveys, gathering fish and benthic data, as well as registering all fishers currently active in a given location.
This makes data storage, standardization, and visualizations all crucial aspects of George’s work, allowing Rare to monitor impact and demonstrate the benefits of sustainable fishing practices to the fishers themselves. “Being able to show live data based on our surveys, and show trends over time to demonstrate that fish populations are increasing through effective management, provides a huge incentive for communities to get on board,” says George.
From local fishers and coastal communities to government, NGOs, and decision-makers at the international level, data plays an important part in progress. “We conduct periodic surveys to see how knowledge, attitudes, and livelihoods are changing over time,” explains George. “If we can show that the ecology is improving, and catch is improving too, we can correlate that with changes in attitudes and improvements to livelihoods.” MERMAID enables George to pull all that data together and present it in a more accessible, more impactful way.
For George Stoyle and the research teams at Rare, efficient data management is about more than just convenience; reliable, standardized data provide them with the tools they need to change public opinion, guide policy development, and ultimately deliver positive impact to ecosystems and communities. For partners, contractors, and potential users of the MERMAID platform who remain on the fence, George has a simple message: “if you can use Excel, you can use this.” He believes the benefits offered by MERMAID – “usability, accessibility, standardization, validation” – give users the opportunity to make a difference, by “contributing to a system that is going to provide answers to much bigger questions.”
About George
George Stoyle is an expert in data management, with a focus on marine ecology and conservation. In addition to being a highly skilled writer and photographer, he has an MSc in Tropical Coastal Management from Newcastle University and more than 20 years’ experience in marine conservation, ecology, database design, and web development. Over the past 25 years he has completed more than 2000 dives, in locations from the UK to Honduras, Indonesia and the Seychelles. He is currently the Director of Technology Solutions at Rare, where he has worked since 2017. He lives in Maine, USA, with his family.