Last Updated: 30 April 2025

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Tier-by-tier detail

Tier 0 – Awareness swims

Typical users School groups, eco-tourists, brand-new community projects.

What they actually do People snorkel over the reef with a guide. Picture cards show the difference between hard coral, soft coral and a bleached patch. No numbers yet—this stage simply builds excitement and reef literacy.

Cost & skill Mask, snorkel, laminated ID cards—well under 100 USD. A half-day talk is enough.

When to consider Tier 1 As soon as the group wants real numbers that can be tracked year to year.

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Tier 1 – Manual community surveys

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Typical users Local NGOs, dive clubs, small marine-reserve staff, Reef Check-style citizen-science teams.

What they do

1. Lay a 50-metre tape on the reef.
2. Volunteers jot down live-coral cover every 50 cm and count fish and invertebrates inside a belt next to the tape.
3. Results go into a spreadsheet or directly into MariMap when internet is available.

Cost & skill Startup gear runs 200–500 USD (tapes, slates, GPS, action cam). A two-to-three-day field course turns confident snorkellers or divers into reliable surveyors.

Strength Inexpensive; unbeatable for community engagement.

Limitation Accuracy depends on observer skill, and the small area sampled can miss patchy problems.

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‍Tier 2 – Semi-autonomous photo-transects

Typical users Regional environment offices, university field classes, citizen-science projects that have already logged Tier 1 data.

What they do

1. Divers tow a camera bar or fly a hobby drone to take overlapping photos along the same 50-m lines.
2. Images upload to MariMap.
3. Coral-AI and Fish-AI automatically tag corals, count colonies, measure percent cover and tally common fish.
4. Dashboards display trends within minutes or a few hours—complete with confidence bars.

Cost & skill $ 200 - 1000 buys a good action camera with proper lighting (attachments), tray or tow-sled and a basic drone. Each survey run costs roughly $1000 (fuel, cloud time). One week of training covers photo-mosaics and Coral-AI use.

Strength You may map ten to twenty times the area per day, and the photo archive is a permanent audit trail.

Limitation Needs a laptop, steady electricity and basic internet to push imagery to the cloud.

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Tier 3 – Fully autonomous surveys

Typical users National park services, blue-carbon verification projects, offshore industries with strong compliance budgets.

What they do

1. An AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) or compact ROV flies pre-programmed tracks, collecting 4K video, multibeam depth and even eDNA water samples.
2. On-board computers run Coral-AI / Fish-AI in real time; if bleaching or a crown-of-thorns spike appears, an alert pings managers immediately.
3. The system produces high-resolution 3-D maps of reef rugosity to millimetre accuracy.

Cost & skill Hardware (especially a good camera, ROV set up) begins around $3 - 5000; a typical mission costs $400–800. Two weeks of vendor training turn staff into competent pilots and maintainers. An option is also to rent a local ROV near you, or through one of our partners in Europe.

Strength Unmatched coverage, repeatability and speed—sufficient for carbon-credit audits or courtroom-quality evidence.

Limitation High capital cost, import permits and the need for skilled technicians.

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When to climb to the next tier

• Precision gap Manual counts swing by ±10 percentage points and conceal real change → Tier 2’s photos fix that.
• Spatial gap One 100 m transect barely samples a 10 ha lagoon → Drone mosaics (Tier 2) or AUV grids (Tier 3) solve it.
• Time gap Crown-of-thorns outbreaks can double in weeks → Near-real-time Tier 3 alerts are essential.
• Compliance gap Donors or carbon auditors demand photographic or AI-verified proof → Tier 2 usually suffices, Tier 3 for ultra-high resolution.

Whenever two or more gaps start to bite, it saves money in the long run to invest in the next tier.

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Estimated budgets for each Tier

• Tier 0 under $100 total.
• Tier 1 $200 – 500 to start; about 50 per survey.
• Tier 2 ~$1000 setup; roughly $1000 per survey.
• Tier 3 at least $2000 hardware (for purchase); $400–800 per mission.

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Constant metrics across all tiers

No matter which tier you operate in, you will always record:

• Live-coral cover (our headline health metric).
• Species richness (how many species).
• Abundance (how many individuals of each).
• Biodiversity index—often the Shannon number, written plainly as
  • H′ = – Σ (p × ln p),
  • where p is “this species’ share of all individuals.”
• Indicator populations—herbivorous fish, crown-of-thorns starfish, reef-building coral genera, etc.

What improves as you climb the tiers is accuracy, area, and speed, not the fundamental questions.
Start where your budget lets you; structure your data so it flows into MariMap; and move up a tier whenever precision, coverage or response time becomes critical.

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Typical Gear

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Item List & Purpose

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① Fiberglass tape (50 m)Lays the fixed-length transect for point-intercept and photo passes.

‍② PVC quadrat (1 × 1 m)Spot-checks habitat complexity; reference scale for Coral-AI image tiles.

‍③ Slate + golf pencilManual point-intercept tally every 0 .5 m; backup if camera fails.

‍④ Mask, snorkel, finsMinimum snorkel kit—Tier 1 teams need no SCUBA.

‍⑤ Action camera on gripCaptures stills/video every 0 .5 m for Coral-AI processing.

‍⑥ Hand-held GPS & spareLogs start/stop of each transect; embeds EXIF geopoint in images.

‍⑦ Twin orange SMB buoysMark transect ends; serve as surface-safety reference.

‍⑧ Deploy-line & reelKeeps SMB vertical; doubles as emergency buddy line.

‍⑨ Colour-cal card (24-patch)Ensures Coral-AI colour correction, compensating for depth/lighting.

‍⑩ Waterproof phone & drybagRuns Marimap Capture app; previews images, pushes metadata offline.

‍⑪ Compact drone (Tier 1.3 add-on)Orthomosaic of the site; maps coral rubble fields and entry/exit.

‍⑫ Spare batteries & SD cards (in Pelican case)Enough capacity for full belt of imagery plus redundancy.

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