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 Apps 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 Parks 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 Apps 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 Apps 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.