189
8.2 Copyright
issues
191
8.3 Recipe for preparing a dried leaf specimen guide 196
8.4 Grenada Field Herbarium
196
8.5 Some brief notes on how to control your camera
200
8.6 Photography and the Forestry Research Programme photo guides 201
8.7 Equipment for a digital photo guide
201
8.8 Layout and other software tools
205
8.9 Graphics file formats
206
9.1 How to run a usability test
226
10.1 Earthscan’s information requirements for consideration in a new book proposal
243
10.2 Reducing printing costs
241
List of case studies
Unless otherwise credited, case studies are written by the author(s) of the chapter in which they appear.
3.1 Defining the needs of users by proxy: A guide for eco-tourists in Bolivia 27
3.2 Species selection in the Caatinga, Brazil
30
3.3 Guides in Ghana and Grenada: Time needed for different activities 43
3.4 Selection of species and discussions about the content for a guide to useful plants in Bajo Paraguá, Bolivia
48
3.5 Format and cost options for a small guide designed for farmers in northeast Brazil
50
3.6 World Bank guidelines for field guide proposals
54
3.7 Developing agreements with indigenous communities in Bolivia 57
3.8 Guidelines for team-working to prepare field guides, based on the experience of the Field Guides Project in Brazil
58
4.1 Shifting local names for the rattans of Laos
64
4.2 The law and Sapotaceae names in Ghana
65
4.3 Scientific names in the tree Flora of Malaya
66
4.4 Chicago Field Museum Rapid Colour Guides
88
5.1 Australian rainforest key
116
6.1 Jargon levels in three field guides
125
7.1 Questionnaire to collect information about the forage legumes to be included in a Brazilian guide for community use
164
7.2 Methods developed on Mount Cameroon to elicit characters used in indigenous plant identification
167
7.3 Experience of writing species descriptions for naturalists’ guide to legumes of the Caatinga
179
8.1 DFID-FRP (Project R7367) trials of illustrative material in field guides 184
8.2 Illustration and The Woody Plants of Western African Forests 213
9.1 Using a graphic designer to prepare the mock-up in Brazil 231
9.2 Preparing the mock-up in the office: The pros and cons of a more economic approach in Bolivia
232
10.1 Creation of a publishing house specializing in biodiversity as a result of preparing a field guide: Experiences and lessons learned from FAN
Publications in Bolivia
239
10.2 Indicators of impact for Biodiversidad del Parque Nacional Noel Kempff Mercado
245
People and Plants Partners
WWF
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), founded in 1961, is the world’s largest private nature conservation organization. It consists of 29 national organizations and associates and works in more than 100 countries. The coordinating headquarters are in Gland, Switzerland. The WWF mission is to conserve biodiversity, to ensure that the use of renewable natural resources is sustainable and to promote actions to reduce pollution and wasteful consumption.
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is the only UN agency with a mandate spanning the fields of science (including social sciences), education, culture and communication. UNESCO has over 40 years of experience in testing interdisciplinary approaches to solving environmental and development problems in programmes such as that on Man and the Biosphere (MAB). An international network of biosphere reserves provides sites for conservation of biological diversity, long-term ecological research and demonstrating approaches to the sustainable use of natural resources.
ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW
The Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG), Kew, has 150 professional staff and associated researchers, and works with partners in over 42 countries.
Research focuses on taxonomy, preparation of floras, economic botany, plant biochem-istry and many other specialized fields. The Royal Botanic Gardens has one of the largest herbaria in the world and an excellent botanic library.
Acknowledgements
This book has been five years in the making, off and on, and was inspired by our diverse experiences of producing field guides before that, which led to the idea of a manual based on actual experience, tested and documented through a logical process with the users. It has been a collaboration between two research projects, and we thank John Palmer, manager of the Forestry Research Programme, for bringing us together, and Katelijne van Rothschild, senior administrator, who has constantly supported and encouraged us.
For encouragement and the opportunity to publish this within the People and Plants Initiative series, we thank Alan Hamilton, Anthony Cunningham and Susanne Schmitt, and for initial guidance and direction, we thank Steve Tilling (Field Studies Council), Sandra Knapp (Natural History Museum), Gwilym Lewis and Simon Mayo (both of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew).
Thanks from Anna Lawrence go in particular to Bob Allkin of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (and based in Brazil during the time of the project), who helped to create the project and provided much energy and input to debates and team-building. Thanks, also, to Frans Pareyn of the Plantas do Nordeste Programme, Brazil; Carlos Eduardo Leite of Serviço de Assessoria às Organizações Populares Rurais (SASOP); Luciano Queiroz of the University of Feira de Santana; and Pierre Ibisch of the Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza for their advice and support to the research teams in Brazil and Bolivia. The members of those research teams are co-authors of some of the chapters; but the whole process relies on their actions, reflections and communication, all of which have been part of a profound and rewarding learning experience for which I am particularly grateful. In the UK, Karen Jarvis helped to organize material at an early stage when it all seemed rather confusing, and Mark Temple contributed elegant translations as I sought to incorporate documents arriving in Spanish and Portuguese.
Acknowledgements from William Hawthorne: apart from our project staff, who are listed as authors of some chapters, thanks go to Stuart Cable, Rosemary Wise and, in particular, Colin Hughes, who was initially in charge of the project and worked briefly in Mexico with the Sociedad para el Estudio de Recursos Bióticos de Oaxaca (SERBO), before leaving to monograph lupins, whereupon William Hawthorne has since managed the project. Thanks also to Stephen Harris, curator of the Oxford University herbaria, and Alison Strugnell for keeping the herbarium in order. Our main collaborators in Grenada have been Alan Joseph (chief forest officer), and with the fieldwork and interviews, Dean Jules and Alban Clarke (forestry co-workers).
In Ghana, we were greatly assisted by Abu Juam Musah (Ministry of Lands Biodiversity Unit and Northern Savanna Biodiversity Project), Ntim Gyakari (curator of the Kumasi Forest Herbarium), Patrick Ekpe (curator of the Legon Herbarium), and Nana Adjoa, Agatha Rockson, Leititia Owusu and other field assistants. We are grateful
xvi Plant Identification
to the Ghana Forestry Commission; Forestry Resource Management Service Centre, Kumasi; the Ghana Game and Wildlife Department, especially their European Union-supported Protected Areas Development Project; the Botany Department of the University of Ghana, Legon; and to Andreas Brede (manager of the Oda-Kotoamso Agroforestry Project, Ghana, and of Samartex Ltd, Samreboi). In Cameroon, our main
collaborators have been the staff of Limbe Botanic Garden, and thanks go especially to Nouhou Ndam, Rita Lysinge and Elias Ndive. We also thank approximately 1500
respondents who took part in our interviews and field trials.
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
2 Plant Identification
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 middle-men, 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 worry-ing 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.
Identifying biodiversity 3
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 democra-tized 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.
4 Plant Identification
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 eco-tourism; 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.
Plant Identification Page 2