Plant Identification
Page 14
‘mosses’). These regional syntheses include checklists, Floras and, of course, field guides:
•
Frodin (2001) has summarized the content of many of these types of publication, particularly Floras.
•
Checklists are, at their simplest, lists of plants in a particular region and usually the first step in producing other regional synopses (see Box 4.6). Checklists become more like Floras as more and more diagnostic information is added; but usually a checklist writer will avoid the task of identification altogether. A checklist is usually an early step towards the Flora or field guide.
•
Floras are detailed descriptions of all (usually higher) plants in a region, taking care to summarize all necessary taxonomic details, and in theory allow precise identifications of plants if you have in your plant specimen(s) all the required details. They are primarily intended for use by other botanists in the herbarium, although they are often used in other situations. The Floras of the world are reviewed by Frodin (2001).
Floras tend to be the field guide writer’s most useful reference books; if none is available for your area, there may be one for a nearby country that is better than nothing:
•
Field guides are also primarily to help plant identification, but are designed for field use, so are generally portable and are also often designed for use by non-botanists.
They have less taxonomic detail than Floras and more field-related information (see Chapter 6). It is not uncommon for a field guide to exclude some of the species from the target group, whereas this would run against the spirit of a checklist or Flora.
•
Electronic identification tools represent a dramatic change of style for botanical literature, potentially confusing the boundaries, and as this change is most relevant to access methods, we defer discussion until Chapter 5.
Even a basic list of plants compiled at the start of a field guide project is a checklist. For scientifically accurate field guides, aim to make this initial checklist as taxonomically rigorous as possible, referencing literature where names were published and listing specimen numbers for your area, if you are not following a Flora with this information included already. You may be in a position to publish the checklist and then leave some
74 Plant Identification
BOX 4.6 CHECKLISTS
Checklists are lists of plants, often from diverse families, found in a given area, often a national park or part of a country. They may be annotated, with extra information; but the most basic are composed simply of plant names. The sorts of additional information that are commonly included in annotated checklists, and highly recommended, are taxonomic details and references – for example, place of publication; specimen numbers examined; ecological and geographical range; and basic features of the plant (for instance, ‘5m tree’).
If the list includes many descriptive details of the morphology of the plant, and especially if there are keys to help identify the species, then we have a Flora (the term ‘Florula’ is sometimes used for publications with Flora-like detail, but covering a small part of one country).
Many checklists were produced over the last century (for example, Hora and Greenway, 1940), which supported the subsequent development of regional Floras and field guides. Recent global or continental checklists are still extremely useful for creators of field guides – for instance, Legumes of Africa (Lock, 1989); World Checklist and Bibliography of Euphorbiaceae (Govaerts et al, 2000). The preparation of the The Woody Plants of Western African Forests (Hawthorne and Jongkind, 2006) was greatly facilitated by the recent completion of Lebrun and Stork’s (1991–1997) checklists of African plants: even without distribution details, the literature references alone, especially for synonyms that are not otherwise available in any database, saved many months of work.
taxonomic ‘baggage’ out of your final field guide. This will help to draw constructive criticism about nomenclature from other botanists before the later stages of guide production:
•
Why not aim to produce a complete checklist as an early publishable landmark of your field guide project?
•
Agencies seeking to promote field guides should not shy away from subsidizing annotated checklists for large areas if such a list is not available already, however non-user friendly or non-poverty-alleviating they might appear on their own. They will have the long-term effect of facilitating field guide production.
Simple Floras, sophisticated field guides
We made a first attempt at a working definition of a field guide in Chapter 1; but there is really no clear boundary between a simpler, user-friendly Flora and a complex field guide, as Table 4.1 depicts.
On the borderline between field guides and Floras are series such as the Tree Flora of Sabah and Sarawak (Soepadmo and Wong, 1995–ongoing) – either a specialist Flora because it is in several volumes (unlike any self-respecting true field guide); has ‘Flora’ in the title; has detailed morphological descriptions of flowers; and takes many years to write. However, since it deals with only trees (and not all other members of the families); there is a separate Flora ( Malesiana) for the area, which mentions field characteristics.
This ‘tree Flora’ has many of the features of a field guide. Its Flora credentials outweigh its field guide ones, especially its weight and volume, averaging 150 pages per family; but we include it for the sake of discussion in ‘The “pragmatic Flora” and other technical field guides’ section below.
Plant names and botanical publication 75
Table 4.1 Floras and field guides: A comparison Floras
Field guides
Designed to be used primarily in herbaria
Designed to be used primarily in the field (also in
(but also useful on field trips, though
herbaria and not necessarily always in front of the
not usually in front of the living plant).
plant in nature).
Rarely planned with an eye on marketing
Sometimes directly commercial propositions; but
strategy; usually subsidized for long-term
more technical types usually require some subsidy,
development of national or regional
as the economic value is not expected to be seen
natural resources (in developed
through direct book sales (except in developed
countries Floras are more commercial).
countries).
Heavy and expensive, occupying much
Ideally in one portable volume. Non-botanists more
shelf space. Rarely found in
often have one on their shelves at home.
non-botanist’s homes.
Emphasize formal taxonomy, like legal
Ideally emphasize the minimum amount of
documents, with lists of synonyms and
information required to identify the plant where it
often specimens of each species.
grows. Rely on other work (usually a Flora) to define Frequently with full descriptions; but
the origin and legitimacy of the plant names.
some only have detailed keys.
Generally include a broad range of
Typically restricted to a narrower subset of all species plants – for example, all vascular plants.
than a Flora – for example, trees.
Supposedly complete for the groups
May sometimes be incomplete for the botanical
included.
groups included (for example, timber trees).
Often cover complete biogeographic
More often are aimed at one country or region within
regions (Neotropics, the Lesser Antilles);
it, where the collation of field characters and local but (colonial) politics often confuse this.
names is more manageable.
Focus on fertile characters, so are often
Foc
us on field characters, so are usually the only way more precise for herbarium specimens
to name plants where they are met in the field, or
with these characters.
sterile specimens. Hence, often less precise than
Floras.
Often take decades to write.
Usually take one to five years to write, sometimes
even months.
Usually lack practical information on
Often include information about how to cultivate or
cultivation or usage.
use species.
Tend to have few (< 50 per cent) pictures, Typically have most of the species illustrated.
although there is a special type of
illustrated Flora, intermediate in this
sense to field guides.
Types of field guides: The spectrum continues
The spectrum from Flora to field guide continues into a rainbow of types of field guides
– from intense, heavy and technical, to light, pretty and information poor; from encyclopaedias of regional field identification to tourist brochures for single parks (see Box 4.7).
76 Plant Identification
BOX 4.7 HERBALS AND THE EVOLUTION OF PLANT FIELD GUIDES
Field guides and other botanical works trace their common ancestry to some of the earliest publications of any sort via medieval herbals. Herbals are practical guide books containing the names and descriptions of plants, with their properties and virtues; typically medicines.
They represent the earliest field guides of Western Europe and illustrations were an important feature. The early printed herbals took advantage of earlier manuscripts, notably Dioscorides’s (40–90 AD) De Materia Medica, the ultimate authority for over 1500 years.
Similar manuscripts were also produced in China: the Pên-ts’ao Chin, compiled between 1
AD and 200 AD, had notes on uses, ecology (‘Cannabis grows along rivers and valleys at T’ausha’) and morphology, with fairly realistic pictures of the plants (Hui-hin Li, 1974).
The introduction of movable type to Europe had a dramatic impact on the availability of information about plants, albeit still to an élite defined by money or education. Its arrival saw three of the most important early herbals published in Germany: the Latin Herbarius (1484) (with descriptions and unrealistic woodcuts), the German Herbarius (1485) and the Ortus Sanitatis (1491). In 1530, the herbal was transformed by the publication of Hans Weiditz’s naturalistic illustrations in Brunfel’s Herbarum Vivae Eicones; but the text is of limited use. However, in Bock’s Neu Kreütter Bûch (1539) more accurate observations were made, and in Fuch’s (1501–1566) De Historia Stirpium (1542), the advantages of Brunfel’s and Bock’s works were fused into a masterpiece about 500 plants of Germany.
Authors as diverse as Dodoens ( Crûÿdeboeck, 1554), Turner ( New Herball, 1551–1568), Lyte ( Nievve Herball, 1578), Bauhin ( Historia Plantarum Universalis, 1650–1651) and Schinz ( Anleitung, 1774) made use of Fuch’s woodcuts (often the actual blocks used in De Historia Stirpium). The 1583 De Plantis Libri by Andrea Cesalpino was the greatest botanical book of the 16th century and, in the opinion of some, the first general text to supersede ancient botanical writings. Many of these reference works are hardly field guides – for example, Besler’s elephantine Hortus Eystettensis (1613) required a wheel-barrow for its transportation.
Another important technological leap was the development, during the late 1500s by Luca Ghini, of the technique of drying plants under pressure and the development of herbaria. The earliest herbaria were like herbals, bound as books and mostly used for identification of medicinal plants. Another landmark, Sloane’s trip to the Caribbean, resulted in an early tropical field guide, just before the advent of modern scientific nomenclature, and linked to specimens. This 1688 guide to West Indian plants and animals – ‘a voyage to the islands’ – has copious, detailed (life-size) illustration; but portability was as low a priority as shortness of title (see Plate 1, centre pages). Yet the massive two volumes no doubt found a place in many naturalists’ cabins on early field trips to the Caribbean.
Improvements in printing and the developments of metal engraving and lithography, for the production of illustrations, gradually reduced the price. By the late 1800s, it was fashionable for ladies to ‘paint one’s Bentham’, a volume of illustrations to accompany Bentham’s Handbook of the British Flora. In England, with increasing education and leisure time and ever-cheaper printing, the pre-electronic field guide was reaching maturity. For more information see Hort (1916), Thomas (1983), Allen (1984), Arber (1986), Blunt and Stearn (1994), and Lack (2001).
Plant names and botanical publication 77
LANDMARKS IN THE SPECTRUM OF
FIELD GUIDES TODAY
The more technical and detailed field guides tend to be more accurate than the less technical when used correctly. However, less technical guides are often usable by a wider range of people, and usually have a primary purpose other than accuracy – perhaps earning money from sales or stimulation of interest. Many of the issues in this and the next two chapters concern guides where identification needs to be accurate and are barely relevant to the other end of the field guide spectrum, where a book sometimes only needs to be pretty and marketable to achieve its goals (see the gallery of field guide types in Table 4.3).
There have been a few published reviews of field guides from various perspectives.
Frodin (2001) includes some major checklists and field guides. Guides to woody plants in the tropics, including field guides, monographs, revisions and ecological papers, are reviewed by Rejmánek and Brewer (2001). Schmidt (1999) also provides literature references to some of the better-known tropical field guides, biased towards North America and including animal and mineral guides. We have compiled a bibliographic database of BOX 4.8 GEOGRAPHICAL COVERAGE OF FIELD GUIDES
It is impractical to estimate the proportion of the tropical flora covered by field guides as the species overlap between guides cannot be calculated easily. However, the ratio of estimated species number to number of field guides in different regions gives some indication of the areas that are most sparsely covered. There are three regions of high biodiversity, Colombia–Brazil, Central Africa and Indonesia, which also correspond to the main areas identified by Frodin (2001) as priorities needing floristic work. They all have either no Floras or very incomplete Floras that have virtually stopped production.
Table 4.2 Regions or countries of high biodiversity and the number of Floras for these areas
Region/country
Number of
Number of
Ratio of species
species
field guides
to guides
South America
98,800
122
800:1
Colombia–Brazil
70,000
44
1590:1
Central America
7380
67
110:1
Southern Africa
23,000
72
320:1
West Africa
10,340
46
225:1
Central Africa
16,320
28
580:1
Cameroon
8000
4
2000:1
D.R. Congo
11,000
7
1570:1
East Africa
7850
39
200:1
Madagascar
12,000
6
2000:1
Tropical Asia
79,500
138
580:1
Indonesia
20,000
8
2500:1
Australia
25,000
50
500:1
Source: species totals are taken from Bra
mwell (2002)
78 Plant Identification
Table 4.3 The spectrum of field guides
Checklist
Checklists of the Forest Trees and
Shrubs of the British
Empire–Tanganyika Territory (Hora and
Greenway, 1940)
A starting point for subsequent field
guides and Floras.
Monograph
Monograph of Leucaena
(Leguminosae-
Mimosoideae) (Hughes,
1998a)
Essential reference books
for field guide writers; may
include field guide-like
sections or ‘field
monograph’ offshoots with
same data.
Flora
Flora of West Tropical Africa (Hepper and Keay, 1954–1972)
Totally indispensable reference for plants in a region, but rarely very user friendly, field usable or useful for sterile specimens.
Pragmatic Flora
(technical, broad-scope,
complete and not very
portable field guide to trees of
one country)
Kenya Trees and Shrubs (Dale
and Greenway, 1961)
Bridging the gap between
Floras and smaller and less
technical field guides.
Plant names and botanical publication 79
Pragmatic Flora (slightly
technical, broad-scope, complete
and not very portable field guide to
all woody plants of a region.
The Woody Plants of Western
African Forests (Hawthorne and
Jongkind, 2006)
Very heavily illustrated, with
minimal words to describe essen-
tial details of habit, morphology,
ecology and geography. Designed for combination of picture browsing and analytical text.
Funded by the EU to support regional development and sustainable use of natural resources. Will hopefully stimulate production of more local field guides.
Flora/field guide borderline
(Pragmatic Flora)