干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

To fill a critical need for more information on desert-adapted low water-use landscape plants, we created Southwest Plant Selector, a mobile plant selector application (app) of landscape plants from the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer (NMOSE) online database of New Mexico landscape plants. The app, which is available for Apple (R) iPhone (R) and iPad (R), was designed for homeowners and lists plant descriptive items, pest and disease information, and a photograph of the plant. The app also displays a graphic of the three regions of New Mexico and El Paso County, TX, overlaid with text that provides plant water requirements for each of those regions. An associated web page allows users to calculate supplemental plant water requirements for individual plant selections. Homeowners can select landscape plants based on botanical or common name, plant type, and category, region, and sun exposure. Even with the specific user base of New Mexico residents who own Apple (R) mobile devices, the app has been downloaded nearly 5000 times since its first release on 29 June 2012. New Mexico State University (NMSU) Cooperative Extension Service agents now use the app as a part of their standard toolkit for interactions with homeowners. Mobile technologies such as smartphone and tablet apps are gaining prominence as outreach tools. Land-grant institutions can be more involved in leveraging mobile application technologies for education and outreach. This article describes a process that land-grant institutions can use to produce apps for horticulture outreach.