EDB Supports MERMAID’s Global Open Source Initiative to Confront Ongoing Coral Reef Crisis

Date -2024-08-27 Location - Bedford, MA EnterpriseDB (EDB), the leading Postgres data and AI company, announced a commitment to support MERMAID, an initiative of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), by leveraging Postgres and AI to support the conservation of the planet’s coral reefs in the face of climate change. EDB’s commitment as an official sponsor of MERMAID supports the 30x30 target of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, “an ambitious commitment to conserve 30% of terrestrial, inland water, coastal, and marine areas by 2030.”

MERMAID is a cutting-edge open source application for collecting and managing coral reef ecosystem data in real time. Postgres, the world’s most advanced open source database, is driving innovation for organizations across the globe. EDB’s sponsorship will help enable MERMAID to harness the full power of Postgres to improve the accuracy and speed of coral reef identification and monitoring. Additionally, MERMAID will soon incorporate AI algorithms that can analyze vast amounts of data collected from reefs, identifying patterns and predicting potential bleaching events before they become critical.

Coral reefs are home to approximately 25% of marine life. As climate change has increased, coral reef bleaching has devastated millions of reef areas globally. In the last year, about 54% of all reefs have experienced bleaching-level heat stress that can lead to the mass extinction of hundreds of species. The implications of these trends threaten the livelihoods of at least a billion coastal inhabitants who rely on coral reefs for food, medicine, and tourism revenue. 

“There are two things that can help solve the global crisis for coral reefs: urgent policy action on climate change and leveraging underwater monitoring data to identify and conserve climate-resilient coral reefs,” said Dr. Emily Darling, director of Coral Reef Conservation at WCS and cofounder of MERMAID. “But collecting, managing, and analyzing this critical data is time-consuming and complicated for coral reef scientists. That’s why we developed MERMAID and turned to Postgres.”  

“The democratization of data across users, environments, and applications is paramount in the age of AI, and even more critical when our world’s oceans are at stake,” said Kevin Dallas, CEO, EDB. “With over 35 years of active development, Postgres is the most extensible and flexible database, trusted by millions of nonprofits, government agencies, and commercial enterprises alike. What we’re seeing here is that Postgres also has a powerful role to play in the future of our planet.”

Since its launch in 2018, MERMAID has been used by more than 2,000 scientists across 40 countries who have submitted over 50,000 transects from 5,000 coral reef sites around the world. Modernizing data collection with PostgreSQL has increased efficiency three to five times in comparison to using traditional spreadsheets. Through data sharing and collaboration from thousands of scientists and volunteers who are collecting reef data globally, MERMAID users will leverage PostgreSQL to manage their monitoring data and empower local communities and government partners to protect these critical environments.

This news follows shortly after EDB announced EDB Postgres® AI, an intelligent platform for transactional, analytical, and AI workloads. EDB Postgres AI is the industry’s first platform that can be deployed as cloud, software, or physical appliance, all powered by the same Postgres engine. Now Postgres and EDB will enable customers to break data silos and launch new AI initiatives across any cloud, anywhere, with the confidence of enterprise-grade security, compliance, and availability. 

For more information about EDB and the MERMAID initiative, please visit enterprisedb.com/mermaid-edb.