Terms of use

About the service

• The service provides daily marine heat-stress alerts and bleaching-risk grading based on NOAA Coral Reef Watch satellite products, together with supporting features such as survey-photo grading, historical Q&A and quarterly trend reports.
• Key boundary: the service provides heatwave early warning, not real-time bleaching confirmation; field confirmation depends on the annual coral survey. Alerts and data are reference material for conservation and research decisions and must not replace field verification or any safety-critical decision.
• Risk grading is applied deterministically from the DHW thresholds (> 4 watch / > 8 bleaching risk), is not subject to manual intervention, and requests to alter a grade will not be accepted.

Accounts and access

• Accounts are issued with least privilege by role; keep your credentials safe and do not share accounts or sign in on behalf of others.
• The guest account published on the sign-in page is for evaluation only; its data is demonstrative — please do not store or process real business material in it.
• Unauthorised access attempts (including bypassing access controls or extracting other users’ data) are prohibited and may result in account termination.

Acceptable use

• Do not subject the service to automated scraping, load testing or attacks beyond normal use;
• Do not attempt to interfere with the alerting pipeline, tamper with grading results, or mislead audit records;
• Research data exports must stay within your organisation’s authorisation and carry attribution as set out under “Data sources and intellectual property”.

Data sources and intellectual property

• SST / HotSpot / DHW satellite products come from NOAA Coral Reef Watch (public data); when citing them, do not imply that NOAA endorses this system’s conclusions.
• Copyright in the coral-survey baseline and photos belongs to the AFCD and related agencies; they must not be publicly displayed or re-licensed without authorisation.
• Copyright in this website’s own interface and copy belongs to ReefBeacon.
• When citing alerts or reports produced by this system, include the accompanying data-snapshot reference and threshold/model version.

AI-assisted content

Natural-language narratives in this system are generated with AI assistance, but every number and threshold decision is made by deterministic code. Narrative text may contain errors or omissions; for critical decisions, rely on the accompanying raw readings, snapshot reference and version numbers.

Disclaimer

• Satellite-derived data can deviate from near-shore reality; when data is delayed, the system labels it “using previous-day cache”, but no warranty is given on upstream data availability.
• The service is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, ReefBeacon is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential losses arising from use of, or inability to use, the service; aggregate liability for any claim is limited to the fees you actually paid for the service, if any.

Changes and interruptions

The service is under continuous development and pilot operation. Features may be adjusted, suspended or terminated; the core alerting pipeline retries automatically and raises alarms, but no unconditional promise of uninterrupted or error-free operation is made.

Changes to these terms

We update these terms from time to time and revise the “last updated” date on this page; continued use of the service constitutes acceptance of the updated terms.

Governing law

These terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.