Plant Identification

Creating User-Friendly Field Guides for Biodiversity Management

Anna Lawrence, William Hawthorne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781844070794
• eBook ISBN: 9781136559723
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

An important prerequisite for successful conservation is a good understanding of what we seek to conserve. Nowhere is this more the case than in the fight to protect plant biodiversity, which is threatened by human activity in many regions worldwide. This book is written in the belief that tools that enable more people to understand biodiversity can not only aid protection efforts but also contribute to rural livelihoods. Among the most important of those tools is the field guide.

Plant Identification provides potential authors of field guides with practical advice about all aspects of producing user-friendly guides which help to identify plants for the purposes of conservation, sustainable use, participatory monitoring or greater appreciation of biodiversity.

The book draws on both scientific and participatory processes, supported by the experience of contributors from across the tropics. It presents a core process for producing a field guide, setting out key steps, options and techniques available to the authors of a guide and, through illustration, helps authors choose methods and media appropriate to their context.

1

Identifying biodiversity:
Why do we need field guides?

Anna Lawrence and William Hawthorne

INTRODUCTION

Plants and animals are the life support systems for all of us. People who farm, live in forests or depend upon fishing are particularly aware of this because they take produce directly from nature. Managing those resources has become the motto of the 21st century as the crowded planet struggles to accommodate all of us and our aspirations for a better life. Yet, it is not only our immediate use of nature for food, warmth, shelter and income that demands our attention; our climate, soil and water need these things to go on working together, functioning as a complete, healthy system. Scientists, and many others, now refer to this complete system and all of its constituent species, genes and habitats as ‘biodiversity’.

Consideration of this wider concept – biodiversity rather than just the species we use on a daily basis – brings a host of further concerns, such as maintaining climate regulation, food security and medicinal discoveries in the future, and emphasizes the wealth of meaning that nature has for our planet’s diverse cultures and religions. These concerns came to a head in 1992 when the world’s nations met in Rio de Janeiro to labour over the details of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The 180 parties to the CBD have committed themselves, under international law, to ‘the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources’.

This question of fair and equitable sharing of benefits from biodiversity has been explicitly linked to rural communities in developing countries, who live among the greatest wealth of species on Earth and are often heirs to rich and unique knowledge about that biodiversity, yet who rarely benefit directly from conservation or scientific exploitation. There has been plenty of debate and some innovative laws and practices to link local people more closely with the benefits from conservation and sustainable use. This book is written in the belief that tools that enable more people to identify and know biodiversity can also contribute to rural livelihoods. They can do this by helping rural people to recognize and manage their biodiversity by linking with scientific knowledge, but in many less direct ways, as well. When eco-tourists buy guides that have been prepared by communities, or through science–community collaboration, they are helping to put money directly into the hands of the local communities without middlemen, while supporting some local pride in being able to show tourists how much the communities understand of the local biota. There is also a potentially beneficial role for the communities in being able to identify plants reliably, demonstrating their capacity for managing these resources when they are negotiating with government agencies about tenure and rights to manage biodiversity. Finally, of course, the national offices which are mandated to report as signatories of the United Nations Framework Convention on Biological Diversity, and the related planning and management of national, regional and local biodiversity, can enhance both natural biodiversity monitoring and local involvement (and employment) if they have the right tools to enable these tasks to be devolved to rural people.

So, there are both local and global pressures to take more care in our use of biodiversity. To do this, we need to know biodiversity better. Knowing biodiversity achieves two things: it makes us better managers because we can observe what is there and measure the impact of our activities on biodiversity; and it motivates more of us to be managers, in the widest sense, by inspiring and educating us about the natural world.

There are different ways to know biodiversity: through direct exploration of the natural world; learning with experts; and studying and comparing our learning with what we observe. Both scientists and local people have valuable knowledge about plants. In order to manage, use and conserve plants we need to improve communication of useful information about plants. Central to this is the need for accurate identification of the plant – if we do not know which species we are talking about it is impossible to exchange information about it.

This book is about helping rural people, farmers, tourists, students, amateurs and a whole host of different kinds of people to engage with biodiversity by being better able to identify what it is they are looking at. Specifically, it is about producing tools to help people identify species, in a scientific way, while also recognizing the need for information to be presented in a culturally appropriate and relevant way, according to the requirements of the people who use those tools.

HOW DO WE ‘KNOW’ NATURE?
CLASSIFYING, NAMING AND RECOGNIZING

Sorting and classifying are fundamental human activities. Young children can be completely absorbed in sorting fallen leaves, accurately, into piles according to species. They are quick to pick up the ‘feel’ of the species and sort them precisely, without worrying about either the names of the trees or the purpose of sorting. A label or name remembered guarantees a slot in our mind reserved for the plant and its associations, and makes the noun concrete; for this reason, of course, names are inevitable whenever we become serious about managing or understanding a resource. For scientists, the naming of species – that is, inventing a name from scratch, rather than identifying – is at the centre of scientific taxonomy, and ‘nomenclature’ (the system for naming species) is controlled by strict rules. This is covered in Chapter 4.

Having classified and named a species, there remains the crucial step of recognizing it when you come across it again. People who are not familiar with plants, or who do not recognize them immediately, have various options: ask an expert; collect a specimen and take it to a herbarium for comparison with other, named, specimens; work through a flora or monograph which asks them a series of questions about the flowers and fruits of the plant, sometimes microscopic and difficult to observe; or use a field guide. All of these options can be slow and expensive, or require training; but well-designed field guides can provide the fastest answer. Field identification revolutionized and democratized natural history in Europe and North America in the past and can have equally dramatic impacts in other parts of the world now.

FIELD GUIDES

What is a field guide?

We discuss in Chapter 4 precisely what we mean by ‘field guide’ because the term should be understood in the context of the full range of publications that relate to how plants are identified.

By ‘guide’ we mean a source of information: a reference tool. We are not talking about people as guides – signposts in a national park are also excluded; but a poster on a tree in a national park telling us about the poisonous plants is close to the borderline of what we might include. If it explains how to distinguish various species of these poisonous plants, the poster would qualify.

By ‘field’ we are distinguishing guides that are intended to be carried into the wild, out of the lab or herbarium, out of the realm of microscopes and test tubes, but potentially still within the realm of pocket hand lenses and our taste buds and noses. The implication is that these are guides that people will carry along with them, as opposed to being intended primarily for the library reference shelves. A computer guide will only become a true field guide if the computer is to be carried and used in the field.

We don’t, however, want to be too purist about the definition; so if a guide is primarily about identifying species in the wild, and yet is only available on the internet and is not easily printed out for outdoor use, we may nevertheless consider it in this book. However, the internet is not – in 2006, at least – an ideal medium for this purpose.

Most popular field guides are, in practice, books (or laminated cards) concerned with identification. Their main point is to tell you the generally accepted name(s) of something – an unknown animal, mineral or vegetable – that you have come across while outside. There is often also other information in existing field guides – perhaps about the uses or ecology of the species, snippets of interesting trivia or facts which might corroborate your tentative identification. There is a strong presumption of identification as the main purpose of the guide, and this generally affects the layout and sequence of the books.

Most field guides are aimed at the general public and rely heavily on pictures. This is in contrast to other sorts of scientific identification tools, which are aimed at experts, where illustration tends to be seen as less important than technical writing.

In this book, we do make some excursions in to the more general realm of ‘plant guides’, and under this heading we will include publications that encourage use of plants through disseminating local knowledge.

Field guides obviously did not suddenly spring into being as we see them today; for a start, the notion of ‘the field’ was very different when explorers were discovering new continents by ship. Such explorers might have taken a large guide book for identifying plants on their trips if it was kept mainly in their cabin and carried by servants. Illustrations of old plant books were often engraved, and the possibilities for high-resolution printing in a small book were limited. Development in field guide production in industrialized countries has been driven by demand and commercial decisions, and the availability of improved photographic and colour printing technology; but big developments have also been going on elsewhere. As biodiversity hit the international agenda, governments and scientists became anxious to monitor it – to know what is there and how it is changing. International tourists began to find it attractive and to pay for ecotourism; and communities and development workers sought ways of conserving their traditional knowledge about plants and their uses, and of communicating methods of cultivating and using them. All of these people required ways of identifying the plants, or checking their names in order to find the information associated with them. New kinds of guides sprang up to meet these demands.

What can a field guide achieve?

If asked: ‘What is the purpose of your field guide?’, most authors would probably reply: ‘To help people identify plants.’ But what does this identification of plants achieve? Why is it that the authors have gone to the trouble of putting together a field guide in order to help people identify plants? Is it to improve conservation, educate the public, attract eco-tourists or help forest management? To find out, it is useful to look at existing guides and ask both their authors and their users about the effects of using the guide. Many users can say how they have used it, and authors can divulge what feedback they have received.

The World Bank has given considerable support to field guide production over the last decade, based on the philosophy that ‘people will only protect what they love and can love only what they know’. In Indonesia, for example, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences commissioned or translated 15 field guides covering birds, amphibians, dragonflies, snails, bamboos, orchids and wild bananas, among others. These guides make biodiversity information easily accessible to students, environmental assessment professionals and the broader public, and help to build a constituency for conservation.

We shall see throughout this book that guides in different circumstances can achieve some or all of the following:

• By enhancing general accuracy of identification of plants in the field, they can improve the precision of forest inventories, growth and yield studies, or pre-harvest stock maps (where one identification error can cost a timber company hundreds if not thousands of dollars).
• Secondary benefits of the above are, then, a greater probability of sustainable logging and more efficient selection between protection and production areas.
• By allowing local users of a forest to look up a scientific name, and by allowing scientists to validate a local name, a better link between global and local knowledge is likely. People can look up whether species are globally rare, locally used, toxic, dangerous to livestock, nutritious or self-fertile – the list is endless and the benefits unpredictable.
• By improving general knowledge of plants, local residents will have more to tell tourists and are more likely to earn money as tourist guides. Eco-tourists are more likely to enjoy themselves on a forest visit and recommend the place (and the guide) to their friends.
• Field guides, particularly less technical ones, are commodities in themselves even if they are not used for identification. People buy them as souvenirs, and people can profit by selling them to tourists.
• Situated in a library, or advertised or available on the internet, field guides are a beacon that say: these people value this forest; this forest must be of some interest. They put the ecosystem on the map for politicians, bankers, visitors and others to see.

Why do we need new field guides and a manual?

The authors of the Global Biodiversity Assessment, a mammoth work to establish the base-line of biodiversity assessment after the CBD in 1992, state: ‘The range of available field guides, keys and other identifying aids is a major constraint to the assessment of biodiversity’ (Heywood, 1995, p568).

Scientific work (biodiversity monitoring and ecological studies) is being held up by the lack of guides based on recent taxonomic revision, and especially by the lack of guides in local languages. Botanists may know the species well; but they often produce guides that are difficult to use (for example, because they do not know the users well). Conversely, local people and community workers may know the users well, but may produce guides that contain scientifically inaccurate information.

We intend this manual to be useful to all producers of plant guides by focusing on the process which they should follow in order to ensure that the guide will suit the objective of the author and users, and the needs and abilities of the user group for which it is intended. The manual also helps the producers of guides to work within the limits of available resources. The manual is supported by the Virtual Field Herbarium (VFH) website (see Box 1.1).

In this book, we focus on plant field guides for several reasons. First, the great majority of field guides are for birds (as many as 70 per cent, according to Stevenson et al, 2003). However, there are about 25 times more species of plants than of birds. Second, plants, as primary producers, often form the most significant part of the biomass and control climate. And, finally, we are botanists. Having said all of that, we believe that most of the main points in this manual will also apply to animal guides.

In writing this book, we worked with teams of researchers in five countries to explore more systematic and participatory ways of producing field guides that really work and that meet the needs for which they are produced. Our collaborators have produced a range of acclaimed guides (seeBox 1.2) and their experiences have led them to write parts of this book. We accompany the development of these p...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• PEOPLE AND PLANTS CONSERVATION SERIES
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates, figures, tables and boxes
• List of cases studies
• People and Plants partners
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Identifying biodiversity: Why do we need field guides?
• 2 Producing a successful guide: Principles, purpose, people and process
• 3 Planning and budgeting
• 4 Plant names and botanical publication
• 5 Identification: Keys and other access methods
• 6 Plant characters suitable for field guides
• 7 Information: Finding it and presenting it
• 8 Illustration
• 9 Testing the field guide
• 10 Publishing the field guide
• List of acronyms and abbreviations
• References
• Index