Montana Field Guide

Discover Montana's living world with a mobile-first field guide built for browsing, search, maps, photos, and side-by-side species comparison.

Montana Field Guide is a beautifully designed, offline-first reference app for exploring Montana's living world. Built by Nature Tools, it brings together species knowledge, field-friendly browsing, powerful search, rich photos, maps, and conservation context in a mobile experience made for naturalists, educators, hunters, anglers, hikers, land managers, and anyone curious about the state’s biodiversity.

Browse by major clades like mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, fungi, lichens, flowering plants, and invertebrates. If you do not know what you are looking for yet, start from curated collections like Photo-rich, Mapped Species, Habitat Clues, Conservation Notes, and Species of Concern, or use Seasonal Discovery to jump into spring, summer, fall, or winter patterns.

Search goes beyond names. You can look up species by common name, scientific name, alternate names, and bundled species notes, then narrow results by clade, family, photos, maps, habitat notes, seasonality, conservation content, and Species of Concern signals. You can even run filter-only searches without typing a species name, which makes the app useful when you know the kind of organism or context you want, but not the exact species.

Each species detail page is built to help you learn and compare in the field. Depending on the species, entries can include photos, range maps, observation maps, annual activity charts, elevation charts, habitat notes, ecology, diagnostic characteristics, management context, threats, references, and taxonomy. The app also surfaces related species from the same genus or family and lets you compare two saved species side by side.

Montana Field Guide is designed for real use away from a desk. The core dataset is bundled inside the app for dependable local browsing and search, while viewed media can also be cached on the device for faster repeat access. There are no accounts to create, no subscriptions, and no analytics or ad tech in the current release path.