On 12 Jun 2012 at 11:46, wong wrote:

> With the knowledge that many birders are not only interested in birds,
> but also flora, I would like to hear about any good ID apps for
> wildflowers, plants, and trees. I have an iPhone, and would love to
> add at least a wildflower app. There are several flora ID apps
> available, but it's hard to know which ones are the most helpful. If
> anyone out there in Tweeterland has experience with good plant apps,
> please share.

For many years I have used Flora ID Northwest as a companion to Hitchcock &
Cronquist's Flora of the Pacific Northwest for plant identification. Where H&C (like all
floras) is based on working your way through hierarchical keys, Flora ID Northwest is
based on tagging the most obvious (and easily recognized) features until you've narrowed
down the possibilities to where you arrive at an ID. Their web site
http://flora-id-northwest.com/ has some illustrations of this, as well as all the other basic
information. The saving grace of Flora ID is that time of year matters little, whereas
traditional keys are often seasonally sensitive to a successful ID.

The down side is that this is a computer application for serious botanizing. To use it in the
field would require a tablet PC (or somesuch device) running some form of Windows. But
it certainly gets the job done!

Requisite mention of birds: One of the aspects of bird study I've come to enjoy in recent
years is associating certain song bird species with specific habitat types and/or structures,
and for that, some botanical ability is handy if not essential.


____________
Doug Canning
Olympia Wash.