with management of these natural resources. These are just two examples, there are plenty more. It is obvious that Puerto Rico is filled with passionate, environmentally driven people who are determined to showcase the island as more than a financially troubled after-thought of the United States.
As a marine scientist, I share that same passion for ocean and island conservation. My husband and fellow marine scientist, Evan, and I moved to Puerto Rico in 2011 to work on our doctorates. We too became enamored with Puerto Rico’s natural beauty, and sought to protect its fragile ecosystem through collaborative research and by developing outlets to inspire others to do the same. Then in 2015, we founded Isla Mar
Research Expeditions – a scientific field course coordination company. We found this niche in the scientific community after working with a professor from a Florida university to coordinate, organize and lead a field course for his Coral Reef Ecology class for undergraduates in the summers of 2012, 2014 and 2015. Tourism remains a positive economy for Puerto Rico, as visitors from the United States can travel passport-free for a piece of paradise. So rather than create another eco-tourism business, we wanted to create something exclusive to scientists and educators. In short, our mission is to help strengthen the next generation of students by teaching them field research techniques to explore and understand the natural world around them – we want to get them in the field, get them in the water and let them experience more than a classroom and textbooks. We were blessed with the ability to slowly introduce Isla Mar to the community, offering just our coordination services then gradually building to include scientific field services to visiting scientists and local environmental groups. However, educating new scientists and enthusiastic undergrads will always be our motivation.
So perhaps our biggest initiative thus far has been our development of an educational tool for tablet technology – or, an app.
These field courses have sought to introduce students to Caribbean reef fish identification in a condensed amount of time – generally two weeks. As any fish surveyor can tell you, two weeks is certainly not enough time to efficiently learn and practice fish identification while underwater conducting a survey. So we sat down to brainstorm a way to teach this technique faster, and perhaps more effectively than by reviewing reference books and fish quizzes alone. The idea for the app developed after imagining how tablets could be used underwater to perform surveys and collect data, which transitioned into creating an interactive underwater reference guide for fish that would track what you saw and how many. The idea remained as just a vision until 2015 when we met our developer and friend, Keith Charles of Humans From Outer Space (HUFOS) productions. Keith inspired us to continue brainstorming, as he felt confident he could bring this app to life.
So in July 2015, we began development and production. We campaigned on the crowdfunding platform Experiment.com (similar to Kickstarter, but for scientists) and raised 130% of our goal, receiving more than $3000 in donations. Many applications can cost upwards of $100,000 to create, but with our team of students and early career professionals, we were able to budget and utilize local talent and donated time to bring our vision into reality. From July to January, we spent hours hunched over our computers in coding and brainstorming, then hours more in the field with testing the prototypes. Students donated their time to dive with us and perform trial runs of fish surveys,
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