Valentine’s Day greetings from the MERMAID team! To celebrate, we're sharing a school of MERMAID Valentines for you and the great catch in your life:

Q&A | Working hand in hand with communities in one of the world’s marine climate sanctuaries

WCS Tanzania’s Marine Program Director Jean Mensa on using MERMAID to make decades of coral reef data accessible online, and how Tanzania's globally important climate sanctuary presents an opportunity to support livelihoods and protect coastal biodiversity.

Read his story

CHANGES AND NEW FEATURES

• Easier ways to access your data: sample events API endpoint: New feature from partnership with the Allen Coral Atlas on satellite maps of coral bleaching.
• Import your Excel files data directly from R: Using MERMAID’s Excel template, prepare and ingest your data completely in an R workflow, using new functions in the R package ‘mermaidr’: ​​mermaid_import_project_data()
• Fish belt transects now validate on the total size of fish species, genus, and families. Prevent typos by validating your observations directly to FishBase size observations.
• New validation: at least one rule is required to create a management regime
• Added a new size bin for fish belt transects to support protocol used by WCS India (5-10cm, 10-20cm, 20-30cm, 30-50cm, 50cm+)
• Added new Sample Event summary to the API, to support aggregation by site and date – not just site. The MERMAID dashboard, which currently uses site-based aggregation, will be upgraded to account for date using this support.
• Improved performance by dramatically reducing time to load fish taxa.
• Several bug fixes.
• See our changelog for a full record.

UP NEXT 

Coming soon, expect beta testing of a brand new ‘Version 2’ for MERMAID!

This is a huge engineering effort behind the scenes to improve performance, reliability, and maintainability, in addition to providing new features requested by you, MERMAID users!

New features will include a project health ‘cleaning station’ to assess missing or duplicated transects, and a series of automated graphs, tables, and maps that you can download for your data. This effort will continue throughout 2022, but we hope to have early versions available for feedback soon.

We're also working on a new benthic photo quadrat survey method, for storing the results of image classification.