Abstract

A free iPhone/iPad/iPod touch application provides tools to identify and record information about virtually all species of shallow-living marine shore-fishes from the Greater Caribbean (1,600 species from 169 families). To aid in the identifi-cation of those species, the app incorporates over 5,500 images, most of them color photographs of live or freshly collected fish. To collect specimens for this initiative, several field work surveys were conducted since 2005, in the coastal and insular waters of the USA (Florida to Texas), Bahamas, Panamá, Curacao, and Venezuela, some of them specially oriented toward locations that were not previously adequately sampled due to logistical complexities of access. During these surveys particular attention was placed on the collection of cryptic, hence poorly known, species. Additionally, collection records from many online (museums and universities) and individual databases, as well as the information provided by the scientific literature were incorporated into the system to enhance geography coverage for each species. Together those produced a database of almost 800,000 occurrence records that were used to construct the species range-maps. A notebook module allows constructing and storing lists of species, together with data relating to the list itself and each member of a list, to organize those lists in folders, and to export them by email.

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