[dates] by [author/owner]’.
Therefore, under the convention everything is copyrighted unless the creator explicitly puts it in the public domain – for example, ‘I grant the public freedom to use these images as they please.’ Granting something to the public domain is a complete abandonment of all rights. You cannot grant it ‘for non-commercial use’. Indeed, other people can modify one spot on a public domain picture and claim copyright for it themselves.
You cannot copy work without permission for the life of the author plus 50 years. The Berne Convention now represents a minimum requirement for copyright protection, however, and most countries have now voluntarily established copyright protection for 70
years after the author’s death.
However, although your national laws may be different, artists can sell or license the rights to others. When artists are paid to produce pictures for someone else, they may have, in effect, sold their right to copyright in advance: it will probably depend upon the precise wording of their contracts, and the legal subtleties seem frequently to become very complex.
‘Derivative works’ – that is, copies, modified slightly – are in most countries also protected by copyright laws and are considered owned by the creator of the original.
THE OPTIONS FOR ILLUSTRATIVE MATERIAL
We will be stretching somewhat the definition of ‘illustration’ in this section: illustrative material seems more appropriate, especially for our first category. We discuss the three main categories of illustrative material that have often been used to depict plants: real plants, machine-made imagery and artist’s images. A synopsis of their pros and cons is included in Table 8.1.
Real plants
Fresh plants
Imagine that you want to produce a guide to medicinal plants to enable people to perform an inventory in the forest around their village. They recognize most of the plants anyway; but the guide will be used to increase accuracy and standardize the names used in the inventory. The inventories in question are localized and will be repeated only once every few years.
In this case, it might well be most appropriate and efficient for you to forget about printing, words and pictures. Perhaps you should just use your budget to arrange for someone to turn up for a day or two at the start of each inventory, collect fresh examples of the plants in question and attach names to these, allowing people to have parts of the
192 Plant Identification
.
.
-lived and bulky
-lived solution
or eco-tourists, there may be a legal
Other bad points
Cannot include all aspects – for example,
buttresses and large leaves.
Limited scope to draw attention to
important features.
Hard to publish (impossible via the
internet).
F
problem taking specimens home.
Can be fragile, short
Short
As above, although less ephemeral
Specimens are fragile and may
gradually decline in quality
Can absorb a lot of time and expense.
Aesthetically pleasing layout not
guaranteed.
Often bad for the photocopier or
herbarium specimens.
Only appropriate for small, flat leaves
Difficult to include areas of detail such as
might be seen with a hand lens.
Hard to depict textural effects due to no
angle of lighting.
Cannot be used in the field.
Other good points
Smell, texture and
hairiness, etc., can be
compared.
Details can be
examined with a
lens wherever the
user wants.
Smell, taste (hence,
good for medicinals).
Can have novelty value;
doubles as a ‘field
herbarium’.
Can be long-lived.
Some of the fastest and
most accurate.
solutions where there is
no artist.
More compact than
dried plants.
More durable, flexible
and lighter than
specimens, and easily
made from them.
Many copies can be
made at once.
Expense
Cheap, except time to
collect.
Bags, card, etc., and
probably a box.
Generally cheap after
capital costs.
Cheap if you have the
hardware and a herbarium.
.
.
The three main categories of illustrative material with their advantages or disadvantages aried.
Realism
Maximum (for parts that
can properly be used
in this way).
No scale problems.
Almost complete.
Good for showing form,
but often poor
for colour
V
Good for shape and, for
example, main
nerves only
able 8.1 T
, in
resh plants
Type
1 Real plants
general (see next
two entries for
specifics)
1(a) F
1(b) Dried plants
2 Machine
imagery
2(a) Photocopies
and scanned leaves
Illustration 193
.
-up copies of
, electricity or many
-ray equipment, which
.
ill still need to scan slides for electronic
Need access to X
is potentially dangerous.
The veins in the image may not be
visible in fresh material.
May still need to be scanned and tidied
up digitally
You may as well take and enhance a
digital photo in the first place.
Cannot be used in the field, and
probably not even in your herbarium.
Film and optical equipment can be ruined
by fungus in the forest.
No immediate feedback on exposure, etc.
W
layout, then lose most of the image quality
advantages over digital photography
It is not realistic to make back
slides, and slides deteriorate with time.
Electronics and optical equipment can
easily break down.
Need for computer
expensive memory chips and batteries on
field trips.
.
Ideal where leaf venation
is very important – for
example, for
archaeologists.
Often aesthetically
attractive.
Field usable.
Colours and image
‘vibrancy’ still
marginally better than
digital prints.
Good to have slides for
larger images – for
example, posters and
slide shows.
Image preview in forest
to ensure that difficult
exposures at least
approximately work out.
Scope to record audio
notes on pictures.
Easily processed to
enhance details and to
integrate with text.
You probably have
some of the hardware
anyway
Field usable.
Cheap if you have access
to hardware, else
&
nbsp; expensive.
Slide film is very expensive.
Hardware is expensive.
Optical equipment as for
film; many more images
affordable on the same
budget.
Good for shape and
detailed vein patterns.
No scale problem (life
size).
Good; but scale has to
be dealt with.
As for film.
-rays
2(b) X
2(c) Film
photography
2(d) Digital
photography
194 Plant Identification
.
-putting and ‘unrealistic’ to many
Other bad points
Specialist artist required.
Not as accurate as the above.
Generally poor for field characters such
as bark slash and crown shape.
No colour
Off
amateurs.
More critical to have a good artist than for
drawings.
Expensive to reproduce.
Structural detail less clear than in drawings.
.
ery compact: more
Other good points
Artist design should
help with attractive
and functional guide
layout.
Can be easily idealized,
leaving out some
details or parts.
Details clearer than
equivalent photos.
Details easily
emphasized;
sometimes less
information means
more realism.
V
species or details can
be fitted on a page
than with photos.
Good for leaves, flower
and flower dissections.
Cheaper to reproduce
than colour
Can be prepared
entirely in a herbarium.
Colour and surface
texture information.
Might attract the more
sophisticated and rich
end of the field guide
market for best artists.
continued
able 8.1 T
Expense
Depends upon artist, but
probably a significant part
of your budget and more
expensive than photos.
High; slower production
rate than drawings.
, by
ey points are
Realism
Generally low
design.
K
abstracted from the rest.
Nearer photos than
drawings.
illiam HawthorneW
aintings
Type
3 Artist’s imagery
3(a) Drawings
3(b) P
Source:
Illustration 195
real plant to touch, smell and examine. Cultural differences in perception of abstract images will surely rarely or never apply to the use of living specimens.
We do not intend to worry about whether fresh plants really can constitute a field guide; but they do indisputably mark one end of a spectrum of illustrative material.
There are many advantages of real plant material over printed images. The material might be free to produce, it could hardly be more realistic and people can focus on any aspect for identification. For species that show regional or ecological variation, it is easy to add ‘local’ representative specimens. Smells, taste, texture and touch can be judged clearly only if illustrated by actual leaves.
This proposed solution will be inefficient under these circumstances:
•
if there are too many plant samples to learn before the plants wilt or rot;
•
if the village has a changing population and the inventory is to be annual; the travelling demonstrator may then soon represent an expensive solution;
•
when the sample plants are so many and so dispersed that the work involved in collecting all of them in one place, especially if a regular event, is long;
•
where the parts of the plant useful for identification do not survive picking well or are uncollectible; tree boles and bark fall into this category.
One possible solution to some of these problems is the establishment of small botanic gardens in the villages, with the plants permanently labelled – a sort of living field guide like the forester’s arboretum (this access to material for teaching and identification was one of the justifications for the establishment of early European botanic gardens). While this may substitute for the need for illustrations, and they may, in some circumstances, perform well when used in conjunction with printed guides, we can hardly pretend that the trees of an arboretum come under the heading of ‘illustrative material found in field guides’.
Dried leaf specimens: A portable field herbarium
Even if you are sceptical that we should be including living plants under a section on illustrations, dried plant specimens continue the grey area between illustration and living plants and are often used as illustrative material. Specimens are pressed flat between newspaper and dried in the manner of all field botanical collections (see Box 4.3, page 67). Why not take the herbarium reference material itself into the field? In fact, some or the earliest proto-field guides from the 16th century were books of specimens (see Box 4.7, page 76). It is not an uncommon practice for tropical field ecologists – for instance, those involved in enumerating many plants in sample plots – to do just this, and thereby to do away with any need for a printed field guide (see Box 8.3).
Deciding when to use dried plants
Dried plants solve some of the problems of fresh ones, but some attributes are lost in the process. The texture, smells and tastes, and many of the colours, will probably have deteriorated during drying, for instance. Dried specimens are cheap to make; but storage and organization are not negligible (hundreds of white cards and sealable polythene bags) (see Box 8.4).
196 Plant Identification
BOX 8.3 RECIPE FOR PREPARING A DRIED LEAF SPECIMEN GUIDE
•
Make dried, flat leaf specimens as in Chapter 4 (see Box 4.3) (make enough for all reference copies that you will need).
•
Cut sections of (white) card 5mm smaller than the dimensions of plastic re-sealable (‘Zip-Loc’) bags. You may need two or three sizes of bag; but do not use more than three sizes, as different sizes will have to be stored in different sets to facilitate sorting and indexing. A4 size or slightly larger is generally the most convenient.
•
Put the dried specimens from your press in the polythene bags, backed by the piece of card.
•
Write names and notes on labels slipped in the (back of the) card.
•
Store these cards in a box, for easy browsing.
•
If necessary, introduce dividers or other index methods (see Chapter 5).
For species that show regional or ecological variation, it is easy to add ‘local’ representative specimens. The same material can be put to very good use for identifying other dried specimens collected when the plant is not easily identified in the field.
A photograph of a living plant will usually provide more accurate colours than a dried specimen. Large leaves have to be fragmented (or stored in an impractically large folder) and can therefore be hard to recognize, and some aspects of a living plant cannot be shown using portable plant parts at all. It may be inadvisable or impossible to provide material for rare plants; yet these may well be precisely the plants for which the guide is needed. Mass production may be impractical and many potential users may be put off by the crudeness and weight of this reference material.
&nb
sp; Novelty tourist guides or related illustrative material can be based on dried specimens – for instance, actual leaves (such as those of Ficus religiosa) are sold on greeting cards in India. However, export of dried plant material from or to certain countries might present problems for eco-tourist guides based on them.
BOX 8.4 GRENADA FIELD HERBARIUM
Proper herbaria are expensive to make and maintain, so Grenada had none in 2000.
Herbarium curators will naturally not usually allow the specimens to be used by schools or on field trips. This presented problems for the Grenada Forestry Department, not least when trying to produce field guides: the nearest reference material was in Trinidad and a major use was likely to be educational. We therefore produced a minimalist herbarium, made of specimens in resealable (‘Zip-Loc’) bags; these, in turn, were filed in box files (see Box 8.3). As the specimens are sealed, sets could be taken out into the field, and damaged specimens can be replaced. Furthermore, notes and photographs can be inserted into the back of the polythene bags. 1500 named and labelled herbarium specimens were already available as an output of a field guide project. Requiring only about UK£5000 for stiff white card, ‘Zip-Loc’ bags, box files and shipping costs, and the assistance of three occasional volunteers, the field herbarium was completed for the 1500 species (allowing room for expansion to double this) in about three weeks, with the bulk of the work finished in one week.
Illustration 197
Results of field trials of real (dried) leaves
Dried leaf specimens were compared in the field trials in Cameroon (see Case study 8.1).
They did not perform significantly better than other material for accuracy in the name-that-plant trials, although dried specimens were marginally the best in the species recognition trials. Even in the context of these short-term trials of many formats, we decided that the supply of fresh plant specimens would be impractical; but we suspect that these would have been the most accurately matched format.
Machine-made illustrations
These include the only sensible choices for field guides today, where there is an adequate budget, a need for many published copies, and when no artist is available or affordable.
General guidelines
•
Prepare the material carefully to clarify shapes and details – for example, trim to prevent overlap of layers of leaves. Often, ‘less is more’.
•
Choose a neutral, un-textured background for your subject if necessary. Edit the images electronically to remove distracting or incomplete parts.
Photocopies and scanned specimens
The next approach along our spectrum from reality to abstraction is where the dried leaves of the previous section are replaced by photocopies or scanned images made directly from fresh or dried leaves on a digital scanner. Although most photocopiers are black and white, colour photocopiers are very similar to scanners, the main difference being that a file can be saved from a scanner for future printing or scanning. Since cheap scanners are now widely available, the only potential asset of a photocopier is if it is black and white, producing cheap and simple copies, and can be used for rapid and instant output. Colour scans can be almost as realistic as photographs of leaves, although lack of choice of shadow orientation may prevent you from creating a reasonable impression of texture or other surface effects. Scanned colour images are considered together with digital photography. Here we consider black-and-white photocopies made on a standard office photocopier, and black-and-white scans can be deemed, for most purposes, equivalent to photocopies.
Plant Identification Page 32
