Want in-depth info about plants at the National Arboretum? There’s an app for that

D.C.’s National Arboretum is a 400-acre museum of natural history and Earth science, open to the public for hiking, biking and all other kinds of exploring. It’s great, and it’s also a lot.

So the Arboretum has decided to release a mobile app for visitors — a free and easy repository for everything from interactive maps of the park to in-depth information about various plants. (You can even search the app for all the locations of a specific plant if that’s something you’re into!)

The app, which launched recently for iOS (download here) and Android (download here), was developed by Arlington-based web and mapping firm Blue Raster using Esri’s App Studio for ArcGIS. Project manager Chris Gabris told Technical.ly the app has been “many years in the making and in the thinking” — it builds off a web-based Botanical Explorer tool that the Arboretum released in 2012.

The Arboretum’s new app. (Screenshot)

“It really works for all levels of interest,” he said, referring to how a given visitor can get as little as driving directions or as much as a guided tour out of the app. The team aimed, he said, to strike a balance between simplicity and information — they don’t want to overwhelm the casual visitor.

More broadly speaking, the app fits into a trend of museums bringing more new digital technology inside their walls (or fences, as the case may be). But do people actually download these apps? It’s not like there’s a big use case for a mobile app about the National Arboretum outside of the occasional (or maybe just once in a lifetime) visit to the park. Can a niche mobile app like this be more than the digital equivalent of a (quickly discarded) information leaflet?

Gabris said he hopes that, because the app is free, there won’t be a huge barrier to download. Sure, maybe people will delete it immediately after their visit. But maybe they’ll see a value in it and keep it around. For Gabris’ part, being able to drive over to the Arboretum and test the app or see others use it makes this one of the coolest projects he’s worked on in his 10 years in GIS.

“Seeing others use it … it’s very exciting,” he said.