Plant Identification
Page 6
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Method:
1
The best way to do this is to brainstorm (see Box 3.3, page 39). Think about both primary and secondary stakeholders, and use Table 3.1 to provide you with ideas to get started.
2
Start by listing those people, organizations or groups who:
•
use the guide (be specific if you can – for example, women of village X who want to prepare medicines; women who want to sell medicinal plants; men who collect medicinal plants in village X);
•
can provide useful information for the guide (these people, who have specialist knowledge about plants, are known as key informants);
•
already use or regularly come into contact with the species in the guide;
•
might be useful in helping to make the guide user friendly, such as tourist guides who know the tourists’ interests, or teachers who can advise on levels of comprehension among rural communities;
•
support or oppose the project.
Among these, consider subdivisions among the users – for example:
•
Should men and women be considered as different user groups?
•
Should young and old people be considered as different user groups?
3
Add these stakeholders to one column, then make further columns to show, to the best of your knowledge, what are their:
•
interests in the field guide (in what way will it be useful to them?); and
•
knowledge or skills.
Furthermore, what is their willingness to:
•
be consulted;
•
collaborate;
•
make decisions?
4
Finally, review the stakeholders and their interests, consider potential problems that you think might arise and that could affect the production of the guide, and note your strategy for ensuring that these problems will not affect you.
Source: adapted from ODA (1995)
with the goals and expectations of the users. There is a delicate balance to be achieved here. Participation means sharing knowledge and decision-making; it does not mean simply handing over all the responsibility to local people, without outside support – and it certainly does not mean ignoring the usefulness of scientific expertise. Users may have
26 Plant Identification
Table 3.1 Examples of stakeholders who may be involved in producing a field guide
Primary stakeholders
Secondary stakeholders
Users
Authors
Sources of information Others
Agroforestry farmers
Local NGOs
Local users
Publishers
Tribal forest groups
Government
Local communities –
Herbalists
farming or indigenous
Funding
groups
Foreign aid
organizations
projects
Extension workers
Farmers Hunters
Eco-tourists
Local user groups
Printers
Botanists
Specialists
Non-governmental
organization (NGO)
Multinational
staff
companies
Botanists
Photographers
Village teachers
Village schoolchildren
Herbaria staff
Herbaria
Governments
Local promoters
University lecturers
Social scientists
Healers
Forest guides
Government
Women
Scientists
Social scientists
Men
NGOs
Children
Protected area staff
Scientists
Adults
Private-sector
Healers
Educational institutions
Forest guides
organizations
Source: chapter authors
little or no experience of field guides. They may find it difficult to say what they need, which is why we recommend examining a range of examples with them.
Consulting with users can be like conducting a market study if your primary aim is to produce a guide that is going to sell well. But users will not be able to tell you what makes a guide accurate; you will be responsible for ensuring that the guide is more than an attractive cover or a compilation of attractive illustrations, and that it provides reliable and useful information.
Planning and budgeting 27
CASE STUDY 3.1 DEFINING THE NEEDS OF USERS BY PROXY: A GUIDE FOR ECO-TOURISTS IN BOLIVIA
Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza (FAN), a Bolivian conservation NGO, planned a guide (Vargas and Jordán, 2002) for eco-tourists visiting the Parque Nacional Noel Kempff Mercado (PNNKM) in the following way.
Stakeholders were identified as belonging to one of eight categories: 1
FAN scientific personnel, such as authors and consultants who provide botanical information;
2
FAN editorial personnel, who are developing expertise in publishing and are interested in expanding the NGO’s range of quality publications; 3
FAN eco-tourism team: a group of individuals interested in attracting more tourists to the park;
4
FAN management, which is interested in maintaining the high reputation of FAN for scientific research and in expanding FAN’s profile through publications; 5
tourists, who perceive PNNKM as remote, beautiful, highly diverse (with 21 per cent of the bird species found in South America), difficult to reach and lacking in information; 6
biology students, who perceive PNNKM as highly diverse and lacking in scientific study and information;
7
PNNKM park guards, who protect the park (in a remote and challenging border region) and guide tourists around it (these guards have a rich local knowledge about plants and animals);
8
community members in the buffer zone, who benefit little from eco-tourism (aware of the potential for increased revenue, they are nevertheless without practical experience).
The primary stakeholders were seen as 1 and 5 – authors and users – although stakeholders 6 and 7 were also likely to be users. Secondary stakeholders were primarily the other FAN staff and the park guards (2–4 and 7).
The objective of producing the guide is to attract more eco-tourists to a park that, while extremely attractive, currently receives few visitors; some imagination was required in consulting with them. Three tactics were used:
1
Questionnaires were prepared for tourists; but, in fact, the sample included mostly Bolivian biologists who work in the park. In this case, the questionnaires produced little useful information.
2
Staff of FAN, the NGO which manages the national park, held a workshop to discuss their perceptions of what would be most attractive to eco-tourists.
3
The authors of the guide held small group discussions with the park guards, who are the people who spend the most time with the tourists and have a strong idea of their interests and preferences. These guards also know the park very well and were able to suggest information that could be included in the guide.
At the staff workshop, staff pooled their ideas about what eco-tourists wanted and what it would be possible to provide. There were five factors that influenced their decisions: 1
Eco-tourists are interested in both animals and plants, and although the team was better able to offer information about plants at this stage, they wanted to be able to add information about animals at a later stage.
> 28 Plant Identification
2
The habitat diversity of the park was a key feature that staff wanted to emphasize, and they felt that eco-tourists should understand the dynamic relations between plants, animals and their habitats. The information should therefore be organized according to habitat. This is quite different from the way in which the information was organized in the guide to useful plants (Vargas and Jordán, 2003) produced with the help of communities in the same area (see Case study 3.4, page 48).
3
Eco-tourists can afford to pay for a high-quality publication, and are much more likely to buy something that is visually attractive. It is therefore important to use plenty of high-quality illustrations.
4
Eco-tourists are mainly English speaking, some are Portuguese speaking, and other local visitors need information in Spanish.
5
The guide should be a practical tool that helps visitors to explore the park. It should be portable and resistant to wet weather conditions, common in the park.
It was therefore proposed that the guide for eco-tourists should be organized according to the diverse habitats found in the park in order to emphasize the area’s biodiversity, and in a loose-leaf format of laminated pages to make it easier to add information about mammals, birds and other organisms later on.
At the workshop with the park guards, FAN scientists aimed to solicit the park guards’
views on species which both typified the habitats, and which were of interest to the eco-tourists.
FAN scientists classified the park into seven habitats. However, in order to relate the guards’ experiences to their own perceptions, they began by asking them to brainstorm about all of the different habitats they could think of. The facilitator asked the guards: ‘What environments do you know in the park; which should be included in a guide?’ The local name for each habitat was written on a card. Seven posters were then prepared, showing the names of each of the scientifically defined habitats, and the guards arranged the cards showing the local names on each poster. This exercise helped to show respect for the guards’ local knowledge, to relate local names to scientific names, and to emphasize species diversity within each habitat.
Having established the kinds of habitat that are recognized both locally and scientifically, the group then went on to identify seven to ten plant species that are important in each habitat, as well as being visually attractive. These species form the basis of the guide.
Defining scope and scale: A first estimate of number of species to include in the guide
Once different stakeholders and their preferences or needs have been defined, it is important to have an idea of how many species will be included in the guide. This will be determined both by budget and by the purpose of the guide. There are several approaches to deciding which species should be included in a guide:
•
Define a geographical area and then aim to include all of the species that occur in that area or a subset of the species, such as trees.
•
Define a plant group (such as a family or genus) and aim to include all of the species of that group.
•
More commonly, use a combination of the two preceding methods, such as the legumes of Bahia or the grasses of Bolivia.
Planning and budgeting 29
•
Focus on a particular user group and a subset of ‘recommended’ or ‘useful’ species for that group. These human-defined factors, such as ‘medicinal plants’, ‘well-known fruit trees’ or ‘species suitable for cultivation’, require a different approach to species selection since the decisions will be subjective.
Having decided whether the guide’s criteria are biological, geographical or human, it is important to prepare a ‘long list’ from which the final list will be selected. This can be a surprisingly time-consuming activity, beginning by listing all of the known species in the group in the target area.
Listing the species according to natural criteria
If you are working in a relatively small area (for example, in one forest or one community) and you want to write a guide to all of the species, you may need to create a checklist (see Chapter 4) to find out how many species there are and whether it is feasible to incorporate them all within one guide. More likely, you will choose to write a guide to some biological group within that area – for example, the bromeliads of the Atlantic forest of Bahia or the leguminous trees of a forest in Bolivia. In this case, you will still need a checklist to ensure that you know how many species you are dealing with. If botanists do not already have this information, you may need to organize a rapid species assessment of the area in order to find out which species from your chosen group occur there. To ensure accuracy, you will have to either go with an expert who has complete confidence that he or she can tell you what the species are and whether any need further identification, or you will need to collect specimens (see Chapter 4) and take them to a herbarium for identification. This will give you an idea of how much work will be required: how many species you need to include in your guide and how many species require botanical identification or even further taxonomic work.
If you are covering a wider area, you will need to gather your information through other means. For guides covering biological or geographical groups, you will need to talk to botanical experts to find out how well the area is known, and where all the species in that area or group are listed. If you are unfamiliar with the procedures that botanists use for updating their knowledge of species, read Chapter 4 first. Then make sure that your guide is based on the most recent revision of the family or group of species that you are including. You may still have a very long list, and you may need to use other criteria to cut it down. For example, Case study 3.2 describes the process through which leguminous species were chosen to be included in a detailed guide of the Caatinga in Brazil.
At this stage, it is not advisable to list more detailed information; the aim is to provide an initial idea of how many species might be included in order to estimate, later, how much information is already known about them (see Chapters 4 and 7). Once you have found out how much work is necessary to include each species in the guide, a cut-off point can be given by estimating time and financial constraints, and assessing whether the number of species still needs to be reduced. If so, stricter criteria for including or excluding species must be defined.
Occasionally, guides are written as part of the process of finding out how many species occur in an area. For example, Box 2.1 (page 17) describes this process for the Ducke Reserve in the Brazilian Amazon. If the number of species is unknown at the beginning of the project, budget flexibility will be needed in order to assess species diversity.
30 Plant Identification
CASE STUDY 3.2 SPECIES SELECTION IN THE CAATINGA, BRAZIL
Species selection is often a highly iterative process – in other words, the preliminary list is defined roughly, and is periodically reassessed after episodes of fieldwork or reflection.
SASOP (Serviço de Assessoria às Organizações Populares Rurais), an environmental NGO
based in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, wanted to involve the farmers in the Caatinga in selecting 21 species to be included in a guide to forage legumes for use in more sustainable agricultural systems (Costa et al, 2002). In each community, the process involved: 1
A meeting with the farmers and the project team to explain the objectives of the project and to discuss what kind of fieldwork would be necessary in order to select and collect the plants.
2
A field walk so that:
•
the farmers could point out the plants which interest them and talk about their knowledge of each plant;
•
the team could collect the plants at the same time in order to take them to the herbarium.
3
Summarizing information in the table. This serves to highlight gaps in information and also allows su
rplus information (that is, not needed for the purpose of the guide) to be identified.
4
Returning to the communities to fill in the gaps in the table. For example, this approach might show that soil preferences were known for most species but lacking for one or two.
5
Developing a systematic format for each species.
6 Filling in a questionnaire (see Chapter 6) with the help of the community.
Questionnaires assist in structuring questions, increasing the efficiency of information collection and promoting the recording of information in a structured way.
7
Selecting the final species list, taking into account both botanical knowledge and the farmers’ knowledge.
8
Presenting the results to the community.
9
Asking farmers to prepare a definitive species list. This was achieved by going back to the plants in the table and arguing that not all of the species in the botanists’ list would be used for forage. The farmers also considered other criteria, such as use as food during drought; use as food throughout the year; fast leaf production during the rainy season; leaves slow to decompose when they fall, thereby conserving dry forage; medicinal uses; human food; and concerns about the decline or disappearance of some species, whether through plagues, diseases or deforestation.
10 Repeating the process in other communities so that the final list incorporates the priorities of each. In communities consulted later in the process, much time was saved by proposing that the species should be selected immediately by applying the questionnaire.
It is important to be particularly careful when attempting to write a guide on all species in a given family (or a given forest, etc.). If a species is not included, users may assume that it is a different species. It must be clear from the outset whether the book covers a sample of species from that group or all species.
Listing the species according to subjective criteria If the guide is about species that serve a particular purpose (for example, medicinal use or aesthetic beauty), or is simply about a sample of species within a particular group,
Planning and budgeting 31
species selection requires more subjective decision-making. In such cases, the stakeholders will not all be in agreement about which species to include. What is useful to one person may be quite unimportant to another. The authors and facilitators therefore need to think about: