Reef Smart Guides

Reef Smart Guides, often shortened to Reef Smart, is a Canadian company founded in 2016 and headquartered in Montreal, Quebec. The business specializes in creating digital 3D models of recreational dive and snorkel sites using photogrammetry, a technology that has transformed how divers and snorkelers engage with marine environments, especially coral reefs. These 3D models serve mainly as digital marketing tools for tourism-related businesses, such as dive operators, resorts, liveaboard charters, and tourism boards.

Insight into hurricane forces

The company has produced 3D models of natural coral reefs, historic shipwrecks, and artificial reefs—including the interiors of some wrecks—across more than 20 countries. It also publishes a travel guide series covering diving, snorkeling, and surfing for eight destinations: Barbados, Bonaire, Curaçao, Grand Cayman, and several regions in Florida (Palm Beach, the Florida Panhandle, the Florida Keys, and Fort Lauderdale). Mango Publishing distributed this series from 2018 to 2025, after which Turner Publishing took over.

Reef Smart Guides’ maps are also available in physical forms, such as waterproof handheld cards and large-format prints. These are often placed in public areas near shoreline access points for dive and snorkel sites to promote safety and awareness. Such signage has been installed in Broward County, Okaloosa County, and Palm Beach County, Florida. In 2022, the Palm Beach County Department of Environmental Resources Management installed a map of the Phil Foster Park dive and snorkel trail at Blue Heron Bridge, which the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) calls the top shore dive in the United States.

In September 2025, Reef Smart Guides ran an underwater 3D mapping training project with scuba divers from several Miami-area dive centers, in partnership with the nonprofit Miami-Dade Reef Guard Association. The goal was to train local divers to collect data for expanding the region’s underwater maps, benefiting the broader community. So far, nine dive sites have been mapped, and seven local divers have received training. While 3D modeling artificial reefs off Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2017, a Reef Smart Guides dive team accidentally took part in a natural experiment that revealed how artificial reefs hold up during a hurricane.