The Marine Science and Technology Center at Highline College in Washington has put together a list of iPad app resources for classes in marine biology and oceanography, beach walks, critter and plankton identification, citizen science, and nature journaling. I’m sharing them here in the hopes you will find them useful as you enjoy our ocean.

• “Marine Debris Tracker” for some citizen science during your beach walk
• Earth Now, NASA’s Earth Now is an application that visualizes recent global climate data from Earth Science satellites, including surface air temperature, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, and water vapor as well as gravity and sea level variations.  The app is free and available for iPhone and Android users.
• Project Secchi Disk — Citizen science program for water clarity… http://www.secchidisk.org/
• Observe to Learn:  Exploring Animal Behavior by the Lincoln Park Zoological Society   https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/observe-to-learn-exploring/id597484368?mt=8
• iNaturalist, a citizen science app that allows people to take pictures of species and share them with a huge online base of other citizen scientists and naturalists for identification.  Observations are put into data repositories and shared with scientists and resource managers.
• Jellywatch — both online and in the app store.
• “Phyto” for plankton identification
• Several bird identification apps (Cornell has several and Audubon has one, plus plenty of others)
• Plant identification apps like “2250 Washington Wildflowers” or “PlantNet”
• “FischFinder” for fish identification
• The Snohomish County Marine Resources Committee recently developed a data management application called MyCoast, usable by citizen scientists and homeowners in Snohomish County. Also, the Northwest Straits Initiative, which oversees all of the North Puget Sound MRCs, has built a wonderful data management tool called SoundIQ.  I assume they both work on iPads, but contact the people listed on the respective websites (app/tool names are hyperlinked—just click on them) for more information.
• A sea level rise app called ‘PolarExplorer:  Sea Level’  www.polarexplorer.org    There is a whole section on what is the role of the oceans in sea level rise and you can dive down into the ocean to see where the heat is stored – etc.
• A couple great apps that we use with our teens here at Mote Marine Laboratory (Sarasota, FL) are : the Marine Debris Tracking app and Ocean Conservancy’s Clean Swell app. These are great to track debris and other cleanup artifacts.