The National Park Service invites you to take along a virtual botanist the next time you visit the Santa Monica Mountains. With over 1000 plants and 7500 photos, this App offers both novice and advanced wildflower enthusiasts the opportunity to identify common and rare plants while exploring remote areas of the Santa Monica Mountains.
Visitors can chose several basic flower characteristics on the App's interface like color, size and shape. Based on those characteristics, the App presents several possible photographs to compare to the actual flower. Flowers that are more difficult to identify often come with several photographs so that visitors can confidently make an accurate identification.
The App is based off of the award winning website "Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area." An easy way to experience the content of the App before deciding to download is to visit the online version at the Park's website: www.nps.gov/samo. Click "Plan Your Visit" > Follow "Things To Do" then "Look For Wildflowers". There you will find a link called "Mobile Web Version - Smart Phones" that leads to the version of the WildFlower website that closely resembles the content of the App. A direct link to the mobile version is also available on the App's website. Or, here is the direct address: https://www.smmflowers.org/mobile/Bloom.htm
The App resides entirely on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, so the content generally loads much more quickly than even the highest speed connection allows. An important benefit of this is that if you are out in remote places without a signal, you can still access all of the App's content. One consideration when downloading the App is that it takes up about 700MB (0.7GB) of the device’s internal memory due to the high number and resolution of the flower photographs.
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SMM WildFlowers FAQ
Is SMM WildFlowers free?
Yes, SMM WildFlowers is completely free and it doesn't have any in-app purchases or subscriptions.
Is SMM WildFlowers legit?
✅ The SMM WildFlowers app appears to be high-quality and legitimate. Users are very satisfied.
Truly excellent photos (high quality images focused on the flower parts necessary for IDing). This app’s catalog of species is extremely comprehensive (includes the majority of taxa in the SMMNRA. The organization is also really good: searchable using by taxonomic family or scientific name or common name....
HOWEVER, I have this it installed on my iPhone SE (with plenty of available memory) but it frequently (over & over & over again) crashes while I do searches. This is frustrating because, otherwise, this is a pretty wonderful app. Updates shouldn’t abandon relevance for the still widely used iPhone SE. Not everyone drops several hundred dollars every few years to get a new mobile phone when older models are still completely functional.
Best plant identification guide for generalists.
Easy to use and reliable. Great photos. Links to more detailed plant descriptions. Well illustrated. Thank you to the app creator for enhancing my hiking experiences.
Great app for the Santa Monica mountains
I love this app! I have been using it everyday this spring to identify the flowers I come across while spending time in the mountains. It would be even better if I could tick the flowers I have identified. The old memory is not what it used to be!
Loved this app from the start
Thank you to the compilers of this app. You have made my hikes come alive with information. If you live in Ventura County, and love plants in nature, this app is a joy.
A pleasure to use
I am a highschool student and I collect samples of our local species very frequently and I found this app to be a wonderful companion. It is very comprehensive and has a large database of flowering species. Thank you very much for this field guide!
SMM Wildflowers
This is a VERY user-friendly app. It includes great information and photos. It would be very useful, either for flower lovers or for classroom use. It is designed to identify plants found in the Santa Monica Mountains area, but after looking through the data base, can see that it would be useful to me (in WI) since so many flowers are the same or similar. The flower identification tool is especially handy, allowing you to select identifiable features of the plant such as color, woody versus herbaceous, blooming season, etc. I am impressed!
Compleat SMM Flowers
Excellent application with an exhaustive list of wildflowers and their various names. Photography is excellent. Particularly useful for identification are multiple photographs of flowers at different scales and leaves and whole plants. Also valuable is searching by both common and scientific names.
On the other hand, if you use the application as a field guide, searching is quite impossible if you don't know the name. For future versionsI would recommend adding searching with thumbrint images organized by color
Excellent detail to be emulated by the NPS
An excellently organized, cogent, tightly written app to cover the flowers here.
Tony Valois, I assume, is an employee of the national park service since this app is copyrighted by the NPS. If so, Tony should be commended and made the NPS project officer for creating a comprehensive suite of applications for the NPS to cover NPS Maps and charts, NPS flora(as here), and NPS fauna.
Why does the NPS continue to let the need for a centralized app suite from the government jgo unanswered?
Do not continue to let third parties contribute questionable, incomplete maps and information. While the National Geographic society has a great map application, it is for only a few parks, and other apps are scattered into numerous origins and products.
Make one app, customizable by the end user to include as little or as great information and detail as possible. Allow me to download one NPS app and then in the app add the maps I wish to take with me in the often cellular-bereft environment of our magnificent National Park. Allow me to add the flora and fauna information for as many parks as I wish, to take with me on my adventure.
This should be the legacy of our great NPS.
V/R
Matthew R. Chastain, Capt, USAF
Simply Wonderful
For people who enjoy the Santa Monica Mountains this wildflower identifier gallery is a must. It presents several views of each species and includes the latest finds of rare and endangered species. For people who frequent other areas of Southern California, many wildflower species are the same or similar to those in the Santa Monica Mountains. This a great resource for anyone with the slightest interest in wildflowers of Southern California.
The best app ever
Beautiful pics. Good for store plant shopping too.
