Marine Life Sightings in Scubase®

The Sightings tab in the dive window allows the recording of marine life organisms encountered during the dive, together with the abundance info and any notes pertaining to the encounter. You can then use the Dive Explorer to answer questions such as: "Which site is the best to find a wolf eel?" or "When was the last time I saw an octopus?".

This feature is indispensable if you perform REEF fish surveys (for more information about the REEF Fish Survey Project visit www.reef.org).

The customizable Organism Explorer is used to organize and add marine organisms to the list of sightings for a dive:

Organisms can be optionally explored by pictures. Full screen and slide show presentation modes are available.

When the desired organism is located, it can be either selected for a dive as a sighting or the detailed information for the organism can be viewed or edited.

Organism Details

The organism detail window is used to view, add or modify the organism information. Most of the fields are optional. You decide how elaborate your classification scheme should be. You can adopt the scheme from your favorite marine life book, come up with an ad-hoc system or use the strict scientific classification.

One or more pictures of the organism can be inserted. The images will be displayed in this window as thumbnails or individually in a scaled down size. The full screen and slide show presentation modes are also available. The pictures are saved in the Scubase database together with the organism data.

Note that the organism does not necessarily have to be a species. If you only want to record your sightings on a higher level, you can specify groupings, such as 'butterflyfish' or 'sponge'.

Predefined Scubase Packs containing common fish species for several geographical regions are available for free download on the Free Extras page.