Green apps for everyone’s smartphone

On a recent visit to the Colum­bus Zoo and Aquar­ium, I found a great flier detail­ing some great apps for your smart­phone that will con­nect you with nature. Thanks to the folks at the Habi­tat Hol­low at the zoo who did all the research, some of which I will share below. I threw in a few eco apps I found as well:

• InstantWild: Lets you view wildlife in their habi­tat thanks to motion-sensitive cam­eras around the world.

• Project Noah: Dis­cover nature, par­tic­i­pate in and cre­ate your own research projects and doc­u­ment your find­ings as a cit­i­zen scientist.

• MyNa­ture Ani­mal Tracker: Iden­tify ani­mal tracks with this easy-to-use app.

• Leaf­S­nap: Iden­tify any leaf you find with this cool app.

• Nature­Find: Use this app when you travel to find the parks, trails and out­door expe­ri­ences near you.

• Seafood Watch: Make smart and respon­si­ble seafood deci­sions with this app and enjoy good recipes too. You can search fish­ing com­pa­nies, stores and restau­rants and find out which seafood is best to buy.

• Vir­tual Water: Cal­cu­late your “water foot­print” with this app and find out what a good stew­ard you are of the earth’s one per­cent of drink­able water.

• The Colum­bus Zoo and Aquar­ium: Search videos, pic­tures, con­ser­va­tion news, the Friend Finder and infor­ma­tion to plan your next visit.

• The GoodGuide: Reviews envi­ron­men­tal and social impli­ca­tions of thou­sands of products.

• The Green­Meter: Pow­ered to keep track of your car’s fuel efficiency-just pull it up and put your phone on the dash­board and it will cal­cu­late easy-to-read graphics.

• Ecoble: Sends sus­tain­able news and infor­ma­tion to your phone.

• Fair Trade Finder: Lets you search and add where Fair Trade prod­ucts are sold.

• Dirty Dozen: Helps you avoid the most con­t­a­m­i­nated fruits and veg­eta­bles with list­ing and research from Envi­ron­men­tal Work­ing Group.

My has the world changed since the days of look­ing things up in the ency­clo­pe­dia or in the library’s card cat­a­log. Who would have guessed we would have such infor­ma­tion and ser­vices so read­ily avail­able? If you don’t have a “smart” phone yet, my guess is phones will all be smart in the future as the prices are start­ing to come down. Happy “apping!”

Tues­day Trip­pier lives in Delaware, is a writer and mother of four with a spe­cial inter­est in green living.

Posted by Tuesday Trippier on Jul 12 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.