I designed an app in my mind before getting an iphone. This was to be the sole reason for the phone. Then I found bot:map and realized I didn't need to write the app myself. Thank you for this app, it does everything I wanted and more. Definitely getting the full version when I can afford it. Now I can catalogue the plants in my neighborhood!
I work in a university herbarium, we collect and store plant specimens from various places to create a record of the vegetation in those areas. Along with the plants we collect notes about each specimen, location, characteristics of the plant, and the habitat it was found in (i.e. type of soil, exposure to sunlight, etc.) This program is made specifically for this purpose. While this app doesn't have specific fields for recording each of these details, it does have fields for some and there is a note section into which I can enter the other information. This app also allows for photos of collected specimens to be stored with the entry, which is something the herbarium I work for is currently working on doing in future trips as we are in the process of digitizing our database. There are some things I would like to see added to this app before I would want to drop $50 of my own money (the university is a little pressed for cash right now). The major thing I would want to see added is an actual field guide to help identify plants. Currently you must already know what you are collecting before you can enter it into the app. That's fine for someone who has been a botanist for many years, but for a second year Botany student like me, it's very difficult. If this app doubled as an identification guide and provided me with a naming authority and pictures with the taxonomic info, I think it would become a staple tool for ecologists and botanists everywhere. This app searches a MASSIVE database of species and I could not think of a plant name this thing couldn't find. It's truly amazing and I will probably break and buy the full version once I use up my 3 free field trips because this is much more convenient and helpful than my regular paper notebook. I would highly recommend it to anyone who needs to record plant information in the field even without the extras I would like to see added. Thanks for this app, it's one-of-a-kind. Keep up the good work!
Eco:Map is a professional tool for mapping plants and animals as well as for biomonitoring with surveys on iPhone, iPad or iPod. Devices with a GPS unit determine the coordinates of each find automatically. For each find you can store a number of additional attributes e.g. the sex of a species. Each find can immediately be displayed on a map. Users who want to define their own attributes are able to do so by defining them while editing data. An easy-to-use editor supports enables you to design entire new forms which can be shared with other users. Eco:Map comprises fifteen preset international, German and European databases among them the „Catalogue of Life“ released by Species 2000 and ITIS. The latter one contains more than 2.34 million scientific names and synonyms and 70,000 English names of all organisms world wide. Besides that Eco:Map is able to import user defined databases. For further processing in other databases and applications you can export your data in the formats CSV, Simple Darwin Core, KML (Google Earth), and GPX. You decide whether you transfer a field trip's data to your computer via e-mail, via a browser in a local area network or via iTunes. Eco:Map enables you to take photographs within the app which you can view in a slide show. These photographs can be transferred to your computer just like any other data. Eco:Map Lite can save up to 3 field trips with 5 finds and 5 photographs per field trip. It is possible to import up to three own databases: the maximum number of species per database is 50. The maximum number of user defined templates is 3. The Catalogue of Life database contains only plants and funghi.
