Coralpedia (Version 1.0) is Available Free of Charge

We thought our readers would be interested in a new, free identification guide to corals, octocorals, and sponges of the Caribbean, called Coralpedia (version 1.0).

This guide’s development was paid for by the OTEP fund of the UK government, to assist conservation work in the UK Overseas Territories. 

Version 1 contains images and descriptions of about 64 Caribbean stony corals, 74 reef sponges and 41 octocorals (and a few other groups). Altogether over 1000 images are included.  Its operation is designed to be by simple clicks only.  Options are that species of each group may be ordered taxonomically (default) or by “shape”, and language options are English (default) or Spanish.

The Notes file (English and Spanish) gives many of the sources, other databases, and other taxonomic information and, most importantly, it contains the credits for all those who participated taxonomically, photographically, or both.  The Notes file also explains that this can be regarded as work in progress, with feedback and additions welcome.  (Other groups may be added, if someone is keen to add another Caribbean reef-dwelling group, or another major Caribbean language, given a volunteer translator).  This Notes file is located in the main folder and is accessible both from the software itself or directly by a word processor. 

Another file ‘Readme.txt’ is in the primary folder, providing installation instructions and how to run it. 

There are three ways to obtain Coralpedia:

1.  The primary source is a cd, available from Prof. Charles Sheppard.  Send an email to charles.sheppard@warwick.ac.uk (with a mailing address in the text which is easy to copy and paste, please). 

2.  Download the cd as a .zip.  For this, send your email address (in the text of the message for easy copying, please), and Prof. Sheppard will get the University “files” site to send you the link to download the zip file (it is 200 MB).  This (once unzipped) is the cd content. 

3. A web based version is available by clicking here.  Its format appears to be a “match” with the cd, although because of differences in how pages are loaded, families are ordered differently (alphabetically).  Obviously, viewing images of sufficient resolution means that this method will work slower.  The British Virgin Islands’ National Parks Trust will be hosting this shortly as well.

(Source:  NACRI)

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