Coral Reef Monitoring: MERMAID Discovery Webinar for the East Asian Seas

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Coordinating Body on the Seas of East Asia (COBSEA), GEF/UNEP Strategic Action Programme for the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand (SCS SAP Project), and the Global Fund for Coral Reefs (GFCR) are pleased to co-host this webinar, Coral Reef Monitoring: MERMAID Discovery Webinar for the East Asian Seas “Advancing effective coral reef monitoring and reporting mechanisms in the East Asian Seas through the MERMAID platform”

• Date: Wednesday 11 February 2026
• Time: 2:00 - 3:30 PM (ICT)
• Duration: 90 minutes
• Language: English

During the GFCR East Asian Seas and Pacific regional workshop (Bali, October 2025), COBSEA participants expressed interest in learning more about the MERMAID platform to enhance national coral reef monitoring efforts. MERMAID then offered to facilitate a discovery call to introduce the platform and discuss how the MERMAID can support and enhance coral reef monitoring and reporting efforts within COBSEA countries and across the East Asian Seas region. To expand the scope of stakeholders that can benefit from the webinar, COBSEA extended an invitation to Partner, SCS-SAP, which has a designated Regional Working Group on Coral Reefs. Given the WCS has ongoing programmes in the Coral Triangle region, this webinar will also provide an opportunity for the region to get familiar with the platform, build synergy across stakeholders, and discuss capacity building needs for adopting MERMAID.

As an initiative of the Wildlife Conservation Society, MERMAID is a free open-source, web application that helps users collect, manage, and report coral reef health data. MERMAID has been chosen as the digital tool to facilitate the monitoring and evaluation of the GFCR programmes. MERMAID is supporting GFCR programmes to collect baselines for 10 core Fund Indicators (F1 to F10) and 35 sub-indicators, and to monitor progress against targets for these indicators with bi-annual reports and final evaluations (GFCR Monitoring and Evaluation Toolkit). MERMAID will also be used by the GFCR to obtain summaries of coral reef health indicators. Given the WCS has ongoing programmes in the Coral Triangle region, this webinar will also provide an opportunity for the region to get familiar with the platform, build synergy across stakeholders, and discuss capacity building needs for adopting MERMAID.

Objectives

• Increase awareness on the use and value of MERMAID for effective collection and storing coral reef health data in the East Asian Seas
• Deeper understanding of coral reef health monitoring and reporting requirements
• Enhanced regional collaboration on coral reef and socioeconomic monitoring & reporting