Why FloraVault exists
It started with an orchid, and no signal to prove it.
"Every weekend I'd head out on a trip looking for a flower, and I'd constantly worry that I wouldn't have enough data connection to use iNaturalist. A couple of times I ended up having to search blindly for a flower with no way to look anything up. That's when I came up with the idea for an app that lets you access location data for flowers offline, so that problem wouldn't happen again."
A sighting with nowhere to go
A good find, no connection, and a community database that only exists online. The gap between what naturalists see and what they can actually record, in the moment, became the problem worth solving.
One place, made to work with zero bars
The earliest version did one thing: let you browse and log plants for a single downloaded area, entirely offline. No live data yet — just proof that "download once, use anywhere" could actually hold up in the field.
Connected to the real iNaturalist dataset
FloraVault stopped using sample data and started pulling real, current observations, species records, and photos from iNaturalist's open API — so what you see in the app is what the wider naturalist community has actually recorded.
Download-once regions, per-species maps, a reason to keep looking
Save an area or a species for offline use before you go. Search a species and see every place it's been recorded, worldwide. And every sighting you log joins your own collection, scored by real rarity — because a common daisy and a legendary orchid are both worth noticing.