TreeSnap

Meg Staton

About this app

Help our nation’s trees! Invasive diseases and pests threaten the health of America’s forests. Scientists are working to understand what allows some individual trees to survive, but they need to find healthy, resilient trees in the forest to study. That’s where concerned foresters, landowners, and citizens (you!) can help. Tag trees you find in your community, on your property, or out in the wild to help us understand Forest health!

The TreeSnap app is a means for participants to record the location and health of particular tree species of interest. Scientists use the collected information to locate candidates for genetic sequencing and breeding programs. To learn more about the Treesnap project, visit our website at https://TreeSnap.org/

Ratings and reviews

Great app for threatened species surveys and field data collection with excellent backend scientist support. Being able to refer back to my collection photos has been irreplaceable. Last year, I was able to request several species be added to support my research, and support staff have also been helpful in addressing my bug reports via their GitHub in a timely manner. Also, A+ for the offline option to upload entries later!

Treesnap has worked very well for me. I went into a forest, completed a few of the app's surveys (you can use the app without having an internet connection! this makes sense to me, because you need to press the capture GPS button while physically at the tree), and uploaded my data later once I had cellular service again. It seems a lot of other reviewers don't realize the app works perfectly well WITHOUT internet - in fact, that seems to be the intended usage.

I love the mission of this app but it has two critical issues. The first is the lack of support for dark mode. On a device that is utilizing dark mode the white text is not visible on the white background. The other issue is the inability to add photos from the gallery. Until those issues are fixed I'll stick to iNaturalist. Edited to add: all modern phones include GPS data within the embedded metadata of the photo meaning geotagged batch uploads from the gallery are feasible.

What's new

Updates hemlock form, and fixes a bug causing repeated crashes on devices running Android 14.