Your dive site, in scientific context.

The Allen Coral Atlas maps the world's shallow coral reefs at 5-meter resolution using Planet satellite imagery and machine learning. For every dive on a reef, DeepSix Dive Log queries the ACA's Web Feature Service to identify the geomorphic zone — the physical structure of the reef — and the benthic substrate — what's actually growing there.

The reef polygon boundary is downloaded and stored locally, then overlaid on Apple Maps satellite imagery in the Reef tab. The teal boundary shows exactly which reef you were on, and how far your dive track took you across its geomorphic zones.

The Reef Overlay doesn't stop where the Allen Coral Atlas does. The map also draws more than 29,000 marine protected and managed areas worldwide, at every level of protection, as dashed outlines at any zoom — including all 18 US National Marine Sanctuaries (Flower Garden Banks rendered as its 19 individual banks) and all 61 Australian Marine Parks. Open a site inside one and a Marine Protection card shows what kind of area it is and the rules that apply there.

And for Flower Garden Banks itself, a mesophotic bank below the depth range of ACA's shallow-optical satellite mapping, DeepSix fetches NOAA's deep coral-cap habitat layer live for your viewport — so the reef is on the map even where satellites can't see it.

The Atlas doesn't get the last word, either. If ACA classifies your coordinates as "not reef" but you tagged the dive as a reef, your call wins and reef context runs anyway. You were there; the satellite wasn't.

The Marine Regions Gazetteer (VLIZ) is the authoritative registry of named marine areas — ecoregions, exclusive economic zones, IHO sea areas, and hundreds of other boundary types. Every boundary has a persistent MRGID identifier, the same way a DOI identifies a scientific paper.

For every dive, DeepSix queries Marine Regions by coordinate and stores the full stack of named areas that contain your site. This feeds directly into the reef context narrative — the AI knows not just that you were on a reef, but which ocean province, which ecoregion, which EEZ.

GeoNames provides reverse geocoding and nearby feature lookup for every named place on earth — including marine features, wrecks, national parks, historical sites, and Wikipedia-linked locations. For each dive site, DeepSix queries GeoNames for named features within a 5km radius and retrieves Wikipedia summaries where available.

This is how DeepSix knew, for a dive at Mermaid Cove on Lizard Island, that Mrs Watson's Cottage — a heritage-listed ruin 321 meters away — was the site where Mary Watson famously fled from hostile attack in 1881 in a boiling-down pot with her infant son. The AI received that context and referenced it independently.

The context narrative isn't generated from generic knowledge about a reef. It's built from your dive specifically — the species you identified in your photos, the bleaching you personally documented, the notes you wrote, the depth you reached, the conditions you logged. The AI receives your observations as primary data and interprets them in scientific context. The result reads like a field note written about your dive, because it is.

Five external data sources provide the scientific framework. Your photos, your species IDs, and your notes provide the substance. The prompt instructs Claude to write like a marine naturalist — specific, factual, no marketing language. If the reef is under thermal stress, say so. If a logged species has an unusual ecological connection to this site, make that connection.

Every reef dive in DeepSix includes a Report tab with a structured CoralWatch survey form — bleaching status, live coral cover estimate, and threats observed. The form follows the University of Queensland CoralWatch protocol used by researchers and citizen scientists globally.

API integration with the UQ CoralWatch database is in active discussion. In the meantime, completed surveys are stored on your dive record and exportable.

Every marine animal DeepSix identifies gets a conservation check. IUCN Red List status, CITES trade tier, whether the species is native to where you saw it or invasive. Loaded from a live API when you're online, from a bundled snapshot when you're not.

A Whitetip Reef Shark identified at Flinders Reef gets a different annotation than the same species identified in the Mediterranean. The location matters. Invasive is location-dependent.

Outbreak species — Crown-of-thorns starfish, Drupella snails — are native but flagged when in bloom. Ecosystem damage doesn't require rarity.

If you see something that shouldn't be there, DeepSix generates a reporting link for the relevant citizen science program — GBRMPA Eye on the Reef, NOAA, or the appropriate authority for your location. One tap.