What is the name of your organization?
Reef Support
What is the name of your solution?
MariMap and Open Coral AI
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
A comprehensive, data-driven and easy-to-use platform for marine biodiversity and environmental monitoring
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Amsterdam, Nederland
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
Netherlands
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Coral reefs worldwide are rapidly declining due to climate change which threatens the food security and livelihoods of over 500 million people who rely on healthy reefs for coastal protection, fisheries, and tourism income. Yet, monitoring reefs remains slow, expensive, and often manual. Local marine managers or NGOs must sort thousands of underwater photos and input data into spreadsheets, which is prone to human error and can take weeks or months. Consequently, critical warning signs—like coral bleaching or illegal fishing damage—go unnoticed until it’s too late to respond. The lack of timely, accurate reef data especially impacts small island nations and underserved coastal communities, which often have limited budgets, infrastructure, or technical expertise. Globally, this gap in marine monitoring undermines early interventions that could safeguard reefs (and other ocean ecosystems) and the people who depend on them.
What is your solution?
Reef Support provides an AI-driven processing platform—combining the MariMap GIS software and Open Coral AI models—to automate reef surveying and generate real-time data on coral health.
In practice, local teams or community rangers collect underwater photos or drone footage with basic cameras. They upload these images to the MariMap platform, which uses advanced computer vision to identify live coral cover, algae overgrowth, or bleaching stress among other indicators. Within minutes, reef managers receive clear metrics, alerts, and easy-to-understand visual maps of the surveyed sites. This drastically reduces manual data entry and speeds up decision-making by a factor of 10.
MariMap also works in low-bandwidth environments and can be set up with minimal hardware, ensuring more regional communities can be trained to use it.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our solution directly benefits coastal communities, marine park agencies, and grassroots conservation groups tasked with safeguarding coral reefs. These users typically lack large budgets or specialized staff to conduct frequent, detailed reef assessments. By automating data analysis as well as providing new insights from satellites, UAVs and citizen scientists, we empower organizations, large and small, implement restoration measures before critical damage occurs.
We also engage local divers, youth volunteers, and fishers in our Reef Rangers citizen science program, training them to capture underwater images and interpret results through our AI tools. This not only expands their job skills but also bolsters community ownership of conservation decisions. Ultimately, healthier reefs yield more reliable fisheries, protect shorelines from storms, and attract sustainable tourism—improving economic stability for families that depend on the ocean for food, income, and cultural heritage.
