Oceans (for iPad)

A Concrete Approach to Ocean Conservation
Cemex, the creator of the app, is not an oceanographic or ecological institute—it's actually a cement and building materials company. It is also a strong advocate of environmentally responsible construction and ecology in general, and the publisher of a line of conservation books. Oceans: Heart of Our Blue Planet, the book upon which the app is based, is the 19th book in the series, published in 2011.
Unlike the National Geographic World Atlas iPad app, which includes only a fraction of the physical book on which it was based, Oceans retains the content of all seven chapters, as well as the gorgeous photographs that accompany them. The sections are hyperlinked, and one can enlarge a photo by tapping it. The app adds animations, and both tables and graphics are interactive, displaying different data if you tap or swipe the screen.
Navigating the Oceans App
Tapping on any page in the app brings up toolbars at the top and bottom of the screen. The bottom bar is a slider that lets a user quickly navigate to any part of the app, listing sections and showing thumbnails of each page. Releasing one's finger from the slider takes you to the full page depicted in the thumbnail. The top toolbar displays the app's title. To either side are four icons. A Home button (house icon) takes you to the title page. The Backspace button (back arrow) takes you back to the most recent page you visited. An Outline button (showing a bulleted list) displays thumbnails of all the app's sections and links to them. Finally, an icon depicting four vertical lines displays the app's pages with larger thumbnails, four at a time, for you to scroll through, carousel-style.
A Call to Action
A big strength of the app is that it goes beyond detailing the ways that human activity threatens our oceans are threatened, and largely focuses on efforts to protect the oceans and remediate some of the problems. To that end, it details the Seascapes approach—developed by Conservation International as a model for marine conservation—in which large areas of ocean habitat designated as Seascapes are managed in such a way that people can continue to benefit from their bounty while the oceans' biodiversity is protected.
The early sections chronicle the history of life in the oceans and the emergence of the huge variety of species that populate the seas, and discuss several mass extinctions that killed off a substantial percentage of marine species. The app views ocean health, though, in terms of the ecological impact of human activities. It describes the stressors that threaten the oceans' well-being, primarily overfishing, habitat destruction, global warming, ocean acidification, pollution, and the introduction of invasive species, and details some ways that conservationists are working to mitigate their harm. For instance, a key strategy toward increasing ocean health involves the creation of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), by individual nations or through international treaties, with the goal of protecting habitats and species from one or more stressors.
Sustainable Management of Ocean Resources
Two sections discuss the Seascapes approach in conserving large ocean habitats. The first lists and discusses nine elements essential to "turning the tide" in protecting the oceans, from enabling a legal framework of laws and policies that facilitate marine conservation at local, national, and regional scales, to promoting private-sector engagement with a focus on sustainable management of ocean resources. The second related section discusses in detail nine designated Seascapes: the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape, the Coral Triangle, the Patagonian Sea, the Polar Oceans, the Mediterranean Sea, the Central Pacific Ocean, the Western Indian Ocean, the Abrolhos Seascape, and the Gulf of California (aka, Sea of Cortés). It describes each Seascape's essential characteristics and the species that live in and around it, the stressors that threaten it, and the local, governmental, and regional efforts to protect it.
The text of the app concludes with a discussion on managing the human impact on the oceans. It stresses the need for humans to be recognized as an integral part of the ecosystem, and for the needs of communities to be carefully considered in designing successful management interventions.
The app has its share of typos, including errors in grammar or syntax, spelling errors, and missing citations, such as this sentence that combines all three: "The Washington State Legislature created the Puget Sound Partnership (PSP) n 2007 was created out of concern for the future well-being of both the Puget Sound ecosystems and the humans that depend on them. [cite]" For the most part, though, the copy is clean and lucid, and understandable to laymen and students alike. The content is well-organized, and illustrated with relevant graphics and exquisite photos.
Unlike the Ocean Science iPad app, which is a broad-based primer on oceanography, the Oceans app is tightly focused on marine biodiversity and its conservation. What it lacks in breadth it more than makes up for in depth. Although it is based on a physical book, Oceans adds value in the form of animations and interactive graphics. This isn't the case with the National Geographic World Atlas app, which lacks a lot of the content of the atlas on which it is based. Although its graphics aren't as rich as those of Focus on Earthquakes, which combines a solid mix of text and graphics, Oceans has a much larger selection of photographs, all high-quality images taken by conservation photographers. This free app is a great choice for anyone interested in oceanography or ecology, and earns our Editors' Choice endorsement.