Reviews

Paul McHugh
Main events column, San Francisco Chronicle, Thu, 27 Apr 2000

An elegant CD-ROM, "Wildflowers of the San Francisco Bay Area," can help you learn more about those brilliant dots of natural color on our hillsides. Good for either Macs or PCs, this self-booting guide branches quickly from physical keys to natural history descriptions and 600 great color photos of 380 native blooms. A guidebook might be handier for field use, but once you get home with your notes, you'll find this CD a terrific boost to a swift grasp of local nature.

Lori Hubbart
Past State President, California Native Plant Society

Here, at last, is a fun, quick and easy way to learn to identify the wildflowers of the San Francisco Bay Area. Even a computer novice can quickly learn to navigate around this interactive CD-ROM. No complicated installation procedures are needed - just pop it into the CD-ROM drive, and it quickly boots itself up.

Written explanations, menus and a visual index will help users find their way around. The straightforward drawings of flower structures will be welcomed by people struggling to break through the mystique of botanical nomenclature.

The consistently clear, crisp flower photos alone are enough to entice anyone out to the nearest wildflower meadow. The colors are true-to-life, eliminating a common source of confusion for beginners using wildflower guide books.

A Quick Key feature allows users to look up plants by flower and leaf shape, clicking on drawings until they find a panel of plant photos that match those shapes. There is also excellent information on plantfamilies, explaining their identifying characteristics. Those with somebasic knowledge of wildflowers can click on either a common or scientific name, and be rewarded with a color photograph.

The descriptions of wildflower hikes will be welcomed by users who bound to be itching to get out there and see those plants. One only wishes more hiking sites had been included.

This CD-ROM has an elegant overall visual design, a wealth of information about native plants, and is user-friendly. Users will enjoy it so much, they will scarcely know they are having an in-depth learning experience. The authors are to be commended for this splendid production.

Joanne Hobbs
Sierra Club "Loma Prietan" April 1999

I know little about wildflowers and couldn't identify even the most common in my area but the CD-ROM Wildflowers of the San Francisco Bay Area, an interactive guide for PC and Mac, makes me believe I could learn--and without much difficulty. Unlike books on the local flora and fauna, this CD was designed to make quick and accurate identification of wildflowers using an innovative "point and click" key that guides the user, narrowing the possibilities by posing questions. Each answer steers you through text and over 600 high quality photographs of 380 representative species and their families until you can make a match.

Wildflowers of the San Francisco Bay Area owes its level of detail and quality to its developers. Dianne Fristrom, a retired geneticist/cell biologist from UCB initiated the project because of her love of wildflowers and then to ensure the CD's excellence and accuracy teamed up with native plant authority and Berkeley resident Glenn Keator who is the author of many books including the popular Plants of the East Bay Parks and photographer and UCB botanical geneticist John Game whose work is featured in the beautiful volume California's Wild Gardens.

Not only for the novice, the CD's attention to detail also makes it a valuable tool for those more wildflower savvy and has proved helpful to college students trying to identify a plant visually and finding botanical keys too cumbersome to use. Beta users testify that they can identify plants much faster than when using a book and after it trying it out, I can see why. It makes me want to go out and start looking for wildflowers. So where do I start? The creators even make that easy by providing a list of Bay Area hikes and suggesting months when the flowers are likely to be out. Also included on the CD is an introduction to flower structure, printable field notes for use with the key, a glossary
and resources.