Coral reefs, vibrant ecosystems teeming with life, are facing an unprecedented crisis. As climate change intensifies, these crucial habitats are experiencing devastating bleaching events, threatening not only marine biodiversity but also the livelihoods of nearly a billion people worldwide. Yet, the key to their survival isn’t just in the water—it’s in data. Scalable, open, and standardized data can unlock new possibilities for conservation. But managing massive, disparate datasets from global reef monitoring programs requires a powerful and flexible database solution. This is where open source technology and PostgreSQL play a critical role.
The Challenge: Turning Reef Data into Action
As a coral reef scientist, my journey began with countless hours spent analyzing data in spreadsheets, often under the dim glow of a headlamp. It was in those moments, working with data from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), that I saw firsthand how data could reveal the hidden stories of our reefs—the pressures they faced, the resilience they possessed, and the potential for recovery.
And I wasn’t alone. Scientists around the world dedicate countless hours underwater, measuring individual coral colonies and counting fish that shimmer by. But once out of the water, they often lack an efficient tool to streamline data entry, analysis, and sharing. The result? Fragmented data, slow insights, and conservation efforts that struggle to keep pace with environmental changes.
This need led to the creation of MERMAID—a field-ready, online/offline data platform designed by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) to empower coral reef scientists and conservationists around the globe.
Why MERMAID?
Imagine a world where critical reef health data flows seamlessly from scientists to communities and governments. This is the promise of MERMAID. Built to address the challenges of fragmented data, slow analysis, and limited access to information, MERMAID provides a centralized, open-source platform that enables:
- Secure Data Collection and Analysis: MERMAID simplifies data entry, cleaning, and management, allowing researchers to quickly generate key metrics or share summary data while ensuring the privacy and security of their individual observations.
- Empowered Decision-Making: By providing timely and accurate data, MERMAID enables local communities, governments, and conservation organizations to make informed decisions for reef management and protection.
- Real-Time Bleaching Monitoring: With the announcement of the 4th Global Coral Bleaching Event, MERMAID offers training videos and a rapid assessment method to track bleaching impacts worldwide.
- Global Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing: Standardized data enables scientists to identify global trends and climate refugia, essential for prioritizing conservation efforts.
Why PostgreSQL for Coral Reef Conservation?
Managing data from hundreds of monitoring projects across the world presents a significant challenge: scientists use different formats, species lists, and methodologies. To make this data useful for global conservation efforts, we needed a database that could handle rapid ingestion, structured yet flexible data storage, and complex geospatial queries. PostgreSQL was the answer.
PostgreSQL powers MERMAID’s backend stack, enabling:
- Scalable data management – Handling millions of observations, PostgreSQL ensures seamless integration and retrieval.
- Geospatial analytics – With PostGIS, MERMAID allows scientists to visualize reef health trends across regions.
- Flexible data storage – Using JSONB, we standardize different formats without losing raw data integrity, and handle flexible offline data entry and syncing.
- Rapid query performance – Optimized indexing and parallel queries allow near real-time analysis of global coral reef health.
This open-source foundation ensures that MERMAID remains adaptable and accessible to the global conservation community.
Scaling Up to Global Coral Reef Data With MERMAID
Coral reefs cover less than 0.2% of the seafloor yet support 25% of marine species biodiversity. Despite their importance, less than 15% of reefs have been monitored. Expanding standardized coral reef data is critical for conservation and policy decisions.
MERMAID supports the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN), an operational network of the International Coral Reef Initiative, to provide comprehensive scientific insights on coral reef health.
For global-scale reef monitoring to succeed, scientists need reliable, standardized data. MERMAID, built on PostgreSQL, provides this foundation. Jérémy Wicquart, Technical Coordinator for GCRMN, relies on MERMAID to aggregate datasets at multiple scales—national, regional, and global. By leveraging MERMAID with PostgreSQL’s powerful query performance, Jérémy can analyze datasets in minutes rather than hours.
“The biggest challenge is standardization,” Jérémy explains. “People use their own species lists, data formats, their own units of variables and so on… and this limits the possibility of producing synthesis.” Pulling these disparate datasets together requires extensive outreach before analysis can even begin. “The actual data analysis is not the most time-consuming part—it’s contacting people and ensuring their data is compatible,” he says.
MERMAID streamlines this process by automating data collation and standardization, allowing Jérémy to focus on global analysis. “That’s why MERMAID is important for me,” he adds. “I can just go on the platform, use the interactive map, and immediately see where reef monitoring data exists. This makes it much easier.”
With MERMAID’s standardized format, integrating a dataset—which once took hours—now takes Jérémy just 10-15 minutes. “For me, the quality of the data is better when people are using MERMAID,” he says, emphasizing how the platform simplifies his workflow and ensures reliable, high-quality data for global coral reef conservation efforts.
PostgreSQL: Powering Open-Source Innovation for Conservation
Built on open-source tools including PostgreSQL, MERMAID can flexibly scale to support rapid data processing and real-time analysis. PostgreSQL’s reliability and extensibility helps MERMAID address large-scale, distributed data needs to be stored, queried, and visualized efficiently.
By embracing open data and fostering collaboration, MERMAID accelerates conservation efforts to ensure a future where coral reefs thrive. Thanks to PostgreSQL, we’re building not just a data platform, but a movement—one that empowers scientists, informs policymakers, and helps protect the oceans we all depend on.
Discover the latest findings in the GCRMN Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2025.
EDB is a proud sponsor of MERMAID, an initiative of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). The WCS Global Conservation Program is the world’s largest conservation field program, protecting more than 50 percent of Earth’s known biodiversity, in partnership with governments, Indigenous People, local communities, and the private sector in more than 50 countries.