SMM WildFlowers

Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area

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 choose 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 identification.

The App is based off of the award winning website “Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area” (http://www.smmflowers.org). 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. Follow "Plan Your Visit" then “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 address: http://www.smmflowers.org/mobile

The App resides entirely on your device, so the content generally loads 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 cell signal, you can still access all of the App’s content. One consideration when downloading the App is that it is large and takes up about 600MB of the device’s storage. This is due to the large number of included photographs.

About a 500MB download, resulting in about 600MB installed.

This is BETA version 12. As BETA SOFTWARE bugs might be present.

The 2021 update has focused on bringing the app up to date:

. - Eliminates the crash on Android 11 devices when the setting "Hide pop-up messages" is unchecked.

Other changes:

. - The new Android data management scheme improves the reliability of the installation, eliminates the need for the user to grant the "External Storage" permission (the app now requires no permission), and greatly speeds up launching the app, especially for older/slower devices.

. - Updated a few dozen scientific names to make them current with recent nomenclature revisions.

. - One new flowers and a couple of dozen new photos.

. - Significant updates to some of the text.

. - Many minor cosmetic improvements.