The USDA has an invasive plant species app...and it's no iNaturalist

 As I may have mentioned, I'm a reptile girl at heart. However, here in Virginia, I don't really need any apps to identify species because I am familiar with nearly all of them (though I once had to use iNaturalist to identify a mole kingsnake because I HAD to be sure I'd actually found this elusive species). However, my plant ID skills, though better than average, certainly need some work. Therefore, I am always interested in finding new apps to help with the process. Today, I stumbled across an app created by the USDA to identify invasive species in the Southern United States. I was intrigued, because the Southeast has more invasive plant species than anywhere else in the United States, and it's a huge problem from both an agricultural and ecological standpoint. The app was created specifically for iPad and iPhone, so sorry, Android users, this ain't for you.

I eagerly downloaded the app on my iPhone and found a wealth of information. The home screen is broken down into sections: Forbs, Grasses and Canes, Shrubs, Trees, and Vines. Each category gives a list of invasive species. When the user clicks on a specific species, there are loads of detailed pictures taken of different aspects of the plant (stems, buds, berries, etc) and the specific season during which the photo was taken. There are also navigation buttons along the bottom of the page that provide detailed information and management techniques. As an example, I chose Big Blue Lilyturf (Liriope spp.), an invasive herbaceous plant that I'd never heard of before.

The Good

This app is like a little field guide for invasive species common to the Southern United States east of the Mississippi. As you can see in the photos above, there is a wealth of information available for each species, and the management techniques can be useful for eradication purposes. The photo ID's are also particularly helpful. 

The Bad

As I stated above, this app is a field guide. Unlike iNaturalist, the app does not allow the user to upload photos to help with identification. You'd have to have at least a basic idea of the category of the plant to narrow down your options, and even then, the thumbnails of each species are impossible to browse in the list format. The user has to click on the species to see any in-depth photos, and there are dozens of plants to sift through. iNaturalist has some kind of algorithm that can suggest specific plants to users based on an uploaded photo, whereas Invasives in Southern Forests is less user-friendly. There is a map feature for Invasives in Southern Forests that allows users in theory to see the range for the plant in question. However, the map is a little clunky and the information is not localized enough to be of much help outside determining the state where the plant may be found. My biggest pet peeve is with the "More" option to the bottom right of the home screen. Clicking this closes the app entirely. This button does not work, which gives me the impression that the app was never finished. Lastly, the user would have to either know or suspect that they were looking at an invasive species in the first place. The Invasives in Southern Forests app ONLY lists invasive species, so if a layperson simply wants to identify a plant without knowing whether or not it is native, this app would not have much use.

Final Thoughts

I'm going to keep this app on my phone. It has its limitations, but is far easier to carry than a paperback field guide. The app provides much more detail than iNaturalist or any other app I've used for plant ID thus far. The format of the app makes me feel a bit nostalgic because it hearkens back to the days where I'd carry an armload of Audubon books into the field on my quest to understand the flora and fauna around me. That being said, if I need a quick ID and I'm not sure if a species is invasive or not, I'm going to stick with iNaturalist.