Plant & Animal Identification Apps for Your Smartphone

Anyone who’s gone out hiking inevitably becomes curious about the plants and animals around them. What kinds of trees are they? What critters have passed this way?
You can get started identifying flora and fauna with a few free apps for your smartphone.

Park Wildlife Field Guide (Android & iOS): ENature and the National Parks Conservation Organization clearly designed this app for iPhone first, because stock interface elements from iOS are duplicated with varying degrees of success on Android. Regardless of interface quirkiness, the content of this app is arranged well; you pick the national park you’re interested in and are presented with the birds, butterflies, fishes, mammals, reptiles & amphibians, trees, and wildflowers that live in that park. You do need an Internet connection for this app to work, so don’t venture too far afield.

Tree ID (iOS): Browsing names of trees is great, but when you’re trying to figure out what something is in the first place, you need a different way to search. Tree ID presents you with a list of characteristics and you choose the descriptions that best fit what you’re looking at. Keep narrowing down until you’ve identified the plant! Everything is stored locally, so the initial app download  143 megabytes ‘ takes a while, but it means you don’t need to have network coverage while you’re out and about. (There actually is an Android version too, but it’s $1.99.)

Edible Vegetation (Android): This app from Outdoor Survival Apps is all about finding you a meal in the wilderness. It doesn’t require a data connection once it’s downloaded and separates plants by continent. It also includes a step-by-step guide to test plants for edibility as well as preparation instructions. Its focus on edible plants means it only contains descriptions and pictures of plants that are okay to eat; it won’t warn you against poisonous plants.
The free options for identifying animal tracks are scant and limited, but they do exist for you to try before you buy.

Backyard Scat & Tracks (iOS): Includes pictures of scat, tracks, and gait patterns for 15 animal species, from ducks to grizzly bears. The app provides a ruler so you can measure tracks and has links to online photos. There are paid versions for various regions of North America for $3.99 each or $6.99 for the whole North America edition. While there’s no free version for Android, Scats & Tracks of North America is only $1.99 on Android, featuring almost 150 species.

Critter Trax Lite (iOS): This app is a simple list of nine track and scat drawings for quick identification. There’s also a quiz feature to help you learn tracks without looking at the app, photos of animals, and links to Wikipedia. The full version with more than 40 species is $1.99 on both iOS and Android.