Tree Flora of Sabah and
Sarawak (Soepadmo and
Wong, 1995–ongoing)
Essentially a Flora, but could
function as a field guide if
necessary.
Field guide (slimmer,
technical)
Field Guide to the Forest Trees
of Ghana (Hawthorne, 1990)
Designed originally for techni-
cal officers in the Forestry
Department for forest invento-
ries. Concentrates on
vegetative features.
Field guide (technical, slim, not illustrated) A Field Key to the Savanna Genera and Species
of Trees, Shrubs and Climbing Plants of
Tanganyika (Burtt, 1953)
A few pictures would have gone a long way to
make this more user friendly, but it is admirable
for its ‘pocketability’
80 Plant Identification
Field guide (laminated cards)
Rapid Colour Guides (Chicago Field
Museum) (see Case study 4.4)
Examples here are neotropical pioneers,
around letter size and laminated.
Easy to make, and can be improved or
tailored with time.
Source: R. Foster, Chicago Field Museum
Laminated (fold-out) cards from Field
Studies Council (www.field-studies-
council.org/about/index.aspx)
These are ideal for school use as an easy
introduction to species in a particular study
area, and also make good models for
guides that might be sold to eco-tourists,
particularly if they double as postcards or for
souvenirs/pictures on a wall.
Field guide (semi-technical, heavily
illustrated)
Caribbean Spice Island Plants (Hawthorne et
al, 2005)
Most of the higher plants of Grenada and all
the most important ones. Aimed at satisfying
tourists, students, foresters and interested
local naturalists, with a limited budget for
production and layout. Subsidized by the UK
Department for International Development
(DFID) to link biodiversity benefit with poverty
alleviation.
Field guide (non
technical/shallow)
Trees of the Caribbean (Seddon
and Lennox, 1980)
Something of interest for a
casual reader or tourist, but not
intended as a complete guide to
trees. A larger area, but much
narrower scope than Caribbean
Spice Island Plants and therefore
probably more relaxing to
browse – though less likely to
benefit biodiversity.
Plant names and botanical publication 81
Field guide (technical, bordering on generic guide/student text)
Wayside Trees of Malaya (Corner, 1988)
An excellent and portable introductory text likely to encourage a deep interest in field botany in novices.
Generic guide/student text
Manual of Forest Botany
(Letouzey, 1986)
An ideal advanced student text
for Africa, but not intended for
species identification. Gentry
(1993) has an equally admirable
but different approach to the
same niche in the neotropics.
tropical plant field guides with about 800 literature references, summarizing geographical and species coverage (see Box 4.8). A short summary of trends follows.
Although early field guides were biased towards medicinal plants, over the last century tropical guide development has been driven more by a need for accurate tree identification for commercial forestry, and more recently for biodiversity inventories, environmental impact assessments, long-term ecological studies and eco-tourists. The demand for comprehensive tropical field guides is stronger than ever and the proliferation of popular field guides in Europe and America has shown tropical botanists what is possible, even if publishers are not overexcited by the market for such guide books in the tropics.
The ‘pragmatic Flora’ and other technical field guides More field usable than true Floras, pragmatic Floras are identification guides for use in both the field and herbarium, with emphasis on accurate identification over portability when compared with other field guides. Some will help users identify without flowers and fruits, bridging Flora-level treatments and simpler field guides if a Flora exists at all for the region, otherwise they substitute for them. The target users are often botanists or other scientists, professional or amateur, and others working in forestry, conservation and related spheres with a serious interest in plant identification. They support inventories and technical fieldwork, are useful in both national herbaria and state agricultural or forestry offices, and act as key references for resource-related non-governmental organizations (NGOs). An eco-tourist would have to be unusually enthusiastic to consider buying one.
In most of the world’s biodiverse regions, one cannot expect all unknown plants to be identified immediately in the field, even with the best field guide or Flora, if the names
82 Plant Identification
are to be accurate. Identification of difficult plants in the forest can rarely be definitive if it is to be quick and hurried. Specimens, inevitably often sterile, should be collected for the difficult plants. In these circumstances, field guides are most useful when they help to identify individual plants as and when they are met in the field, but also help with the identity of sterile specimens in the herbarium or camp. This is a part of the niche of the extreme type of field guide we call a ‘pragmatic Flora’. The repeated cycle of field, then herbarium, work is the best way to learn tropical botany; so by helping with both aspects of the work, these guides foster a deeper knowledge of plants in those with a serious interest.
Pragmatic Floras have the following features:
•
complete coverage of a broad plant group – often trees (in ‘tree Floras’) or higher plants;
•
coverage is often for a region of several countries, or at least a whole country or large subregion;
•
typically include 500 to 3000 species;
•
taxonomically correct, but mainly information necessary for identification;
•
characters described are generally consistent across species, and fairly comprehensive for all basic morphological details;
•
modern versions are well illustrated for up to 100 per cent of species;
•
useful, like a Flora, as a general plant name dictionary;
•
help production of simpler field guides by botanists or others (a source book of field characters for such projects);
•
some botanical competence is assumed of the user – but they form an excellent foundation for an individual’s long-term botanical education;
•
take between two and ten years to produce for one or more people (albeit typically while doing other work); some take even longer. They are mostly made by experienced botanists with access to herbarium collections and taxonomic literature; but their production requires considerable fieldwork (see Box 4.9).
Slimmer technical field guides
Over the last 50 years, a vague trend can be seen from text-rich, less illustrated (Burtt, 1953, an unillustrated key for field use) or heavy ‘tree Floras’ to slimmer or friendlier guides, often with a greater range of plants and greater use of illustration. With the facil-ity of adding colour photographs (see Chapter 8), a new wave is breaking where illustrations dominate, but where efforts have to be made to keep the book portable.
The larger pragmatic Floras ar
e inconvenient for field use, even if the library allows them out. In order to reduce the weight and the amount of work required to make technical guides, but to maintain the accuracy for those taxa that are covered, there are five main options:
1 Only deal with species of a particular (presumably problematic and important) group – the field monograph (see Box 4.10).
2 Reduce the information per species – slimmer, but all-species guides for many families (this and the next variety are summarized in Box 4.11).
3 Limit the geographic area of interest (see Box 4.11).
Plant names and botanical publication 83
BOX 4.9 ‘PRAGMATIC FLORA’ AND OTHER TECHNICAL FIELD GUIDES
Tree (and shrub) Floras, covering countries or regions, represent a sub-type common in the tropics, including:
•
Tree Flora of Sabah and Sarawak (Soepadmo and Wong, 1995–ongoing): far too heavy for most field trips, but otherwise field friendly compared with most Floras and useful for specimens in the herbarium or field camp. Probably cannot usefully be called a type of field guide though.
•
La Flore Forestière de la Côte d’Ivoire (Aubréville, 1959): excellent illustrations, with fieldworker-friendly details, but not optimized for fieldwork, with large format, several volumes and a large font.
•
Nigerian Trees (Keay, Onochie and Stanfield, 1960, 1964): fewer illustrations than previous, unusual for the time, with a multi-access key at the back supporting vegetative characters. Well used and liked by botanists in West Africa. Revised as Keay (1989); but revision sadly lost some of the unique features and rarer species.
•
Kenya Trees and Shrubs (Dale and Greenway, 1961): unfriendly, but at one stage indispensable for fieldwork, with too few pictures and vegetative notes, though some local names to help. Identification of sterile trees in the field, even very distinctive ones, involved long hours browsing through many pages of text. Now replaced by the far more accessible field guide by Beentje (1994).
Pragmatic Floras to more than trees
•
Kenya Trees, Shrubs and Lianes (Beentje, 1994): more compact than Dale and Greenway’s (1961) guide, but easier to use, with useful distribution maps for all species and drawings for genera.
•
There are many examples of pragmatic Floras for developed countries – one of our favourites being Blamey and Grey-Wilson’s (1989) The Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe, based on paintings and text of British plants; but there are many other excellent examples, even for the UK.
•
The Woody Plants of Western African Forests (Hawthorne and Jongkind, 2006): packed with field-appropriate photos, drawings and text, and species details are limited to the essentials (evolved from Hawthorne, 1990).
4 Reduce the taxonomic resolution – generic guides (for example, genus level with short notes on some species) (see Box 4.12).
5 Deal only with a subset of the species from many families – incomplete sets (see Box 4.13).
By reducing the burden of information in all of these ways at once, it is possible to make a very light field guide! These are then so lacking in information that they will rarely be accurate, and with limited coverage such guides rarely aspire to high technical standards. On the other hand, they may serve other functions, as the following examples show.
84 Plant Identification
BOX 4.10 ‘FIELD MONOGRAPHS’: DETAILED FIELD GUIDES FOR
SMALL GROUPS OF PLANTS
Field monographs are field guides for single families, genera or similar groups of plants, such as rattans, and concentrate on providing the same detail as pragmatic Floras, but for a limited range of species, usually the most important and difficult to identify. To work, they should be based on a group that, as a whole, is distinctive. They could reasonably allow more information per species and still be pocketable. As the variety of plant form is likely to be limited, in most cases it is sensible for such guides to illustrate plants in a standardized format to facilitate comparison, such as Evans et al ( A Field Guide to the Rattans of Lao PDR, 2001), Farjon et al ( A Field Guide to the Pines of Mexico and Central America, 1997) and Timberlake et al ( Field Guide to the Acacias of Zimbabwe, 1999). In some cases, taxonomists are producing field guides as a secondary product of monographic work (see Box 4.14). In this way a field guide can be truly portable, except that to include all species in this format would bring us back to the pragmatic Flora size:
•
It is very important that field monographs refer to similar species in groups excluded from the book wherever the subject is not in itself clearly recognizable.
Shallower guides: Non-technical, often glossy or superficial There are many guides of this type, mostly with limited distribution. They are relatively quick to make and fall into various overlapping functional categories:
•
Introductory, tourist or enticing guides are aimed at telling short-term visitors (for example, day trippers) something of interest for a small area of vegetation; but not all species need to be named – often only the most obvious species are highlighted.
Species-level accuracy is not crucial, whereas trivia, general interest and beauty are prime attributes. Often such guides include a diverse range of non-botanical information, and may include sections on animal life, history, geology or other subjects.
These texts, in turn, can be subdivided by degree of seriousness expected of readers –
and they will often be readers rather than serious users (compare Seddon and Lennox, 1980, Lack et al, 1998, and Hawthorne et al, 2005 – all aimed at Caribbean tourists, but with varied information content, the latter two verging on a slimmer type of technical field guide with coverage of all woody plants in the area specified).
•
Although the previous types should be eminently usable in schools, school-level texts must be cheap and generalized, but possibly usable in some cases on trips to a forest. It is helpful if examples can be made of widespread and common species in order to facilitate utility in many countries. Very often, these include technical diagrams of various plant families. These can barely be considered general field guides, except those mentioned above (see Boxes 4.12 and 4.13), but are, rather, school class notes. Some material appropriate for schools also falls under the next heading.
Plant names and botanical publication 85
BOX 4.11 CONCISE, SEMI-TECHNICAL GUIDES
These are field guides designed for convenience in the field, or as accurate, user-friendly introductions to an area. Any guide could be nimble if it covered few species; but here we refer to guides with perhaps 200 to 2000 species, where portability (pocket or small rucksack) is as important as accuracy, so the information per species, or species coverage is limited. The target users are those with a serious interest in learning the plants (particularly fieldworkers), who are, however, not necessarily botanists and who will be expected to check critical plants with other reference tools, such as the herbarium and a Flora.
Examples of such guides are as follows:
•
A Field Guide to Uganda Forest Trees (Hamilton, 1981): a useful focus on leaf details of trees, with many drawings.
•
Field Guide to the Forest Trees of Ghana (Hawthorne, 1990): all tree species (down to 5cm in diameter) and diagnostic details were illustrated, with text to support. This was written part time over three to four years (approximately three person years), including the 700 illustrations and fieldwork.
•
Flora da Reserva Ducke (Ribeiro et al, 1999): dominated by colour photographs, arranged in a pictorial key-like manner, yet still includes much technical detail. In size, it is like a pragmatic Flora and covers all species; but to be portable and achievable in a modern project time frame, it covers only a single, albeit extremely rich, forest in Brazil (see Box 2.1 in Chapter 2). Conciseness is achieved by strongly limiting information per species and area of co
verage.
•
A Field Guide to Forest Trees of Northern Thailand (Gardner et al, 2000): rich mixture of many colour photos and line drawings.
•
Arboles de los Cafetales de El Salvador (Monro et al, 2001): no colour and just provides annotated line drawings of leaves. Many guides still use line drawings because they can more clearly highlight diagnostic details and are cheap to print.
•
Wayside Trees of Malaya (Corner, 1988): borders on being a student text. In spite of covering an ‘incomplete set’ of species (see Box 4.13), it is probably detailed enough, with enough species and accurate local names, to function as a complete guide to
‘wayside trees’.
Laminated card guides
During recent years, various guides have been published with pictures, often photographs or paintings, on a single laminated sheet of card. Some are laminated by more than a standard office laminator, more like credit cards, and can then even be used underwater. Cheaper ones become yellow or frayed at the edges over years of use.
Schmidt (1999) lists many such cards covering mostly North American plants, pond life, birds, fish and so on. Although all sets deal with rather narrow groups of species, often in limited areas, they can be recombined with other sets to extend the range.
There are two main design approaches:
•
One approach is to arrange several species on a card according to themes, sometimes with text, or more pictures on the back. This approach is taken in the Chicago Field Museum Rapid Colour Guide cards: two-sided laminated sheets with 20 species per side, often many cards per theme, aimed mainly at researchers (see Table 4.3 and
86 Plant Identification
BOX 4.12 GENERIC OVERVIEW FIELD GUIDES AND STUDENT TEXTS
There are two excellent, popular books that are well used in the field, but which are not designed to identify the majority of plants to species level. They educate and help botanists learn a new flora and put their specimens into generic order:
•
Letouzey’s Manual of Forest Botany (1986) has characteristics of both pragmatic Floras and textbooks (much technical detail and broad coverage of many families in African forests), but is light, slim, well bound and well illustrated with line drawings, with useful field information. It is apparently aimed at technical students.
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