Plant Identification

by Anna Lawrence

  There are now so many scientific journals that might contain useful information, it has become impossible to physically search each one. If possible, try to gain access to bibliographic databases. This is more likely in a university or research institute, and in a relatively wealthy country, so colleagues can be useful in this regard. Such bibliographic databases allow keyword searches on numerous scientific databases. The internet provides many more opportunities to search for published information. Search engines

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  BOX 7.5 VISUAL PARTICIPATORY METHODS

  Matrix scoring diagram

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  Objective: participants assess different items (in this case, species), using criteria that they themselves identify.

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  Outputs:

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  a set of criteria for differentiating or describing species, and the reasons for including them in the guide;

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  species-specific information for each of those criteria;

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  where relevant, differences between different stakeholder groups in terms of their perceptions of the criteria.

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  Staff: one experienced facilitator with, if possible, an experienced observer to record process and results.

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  Participants: representatives from each stakeholder group.

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  Time: half a day.

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  Materials: this depends upon what the informants feel comfortable with. A large sheet of paper, with pens to draw the outline of the table, is ideal for the purpose of taking the information back to the office to copy into the field guide. However, it is also common to draw the matrix on the ground.

  While some participants will want to write the information in the table boxes, others will feel more comfortable allocating the appropriate number of beans or stones to each species.

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  Methods: a common matrix scoring diagram takes the form of a table, with species along the horizontal axis and the elicited criteria along the vertical axis. The job of the facilitator is to encourage the participants to:

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  Name all of the species they would like to include in the matrix (this may already be decided if the species list for the guide has already been agreed).

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  Discuss what the important criteria are to describe each species. This is often a confusing terminology, and it is easiest to explain what you are looking for by asking the group to compare two species and write down the factors that they give; compare another two, and write down any additional factors; and finally ask them to look at the list of factors that differ among all of the species and complete the list.

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  Prepare a table with the names of the species along the top row, and the factors differentiating them down the left-hand column.

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  Ask the group to assign a value or a description to each species for each factor. If assigning values, it is useful to indicate a range – for example, you could suggest that a score of 10 indicates a ‘very good’ or ‘very strong’ characteristic, while a score of 0 indicates a non-existent characteristic. For instance, if one of the criteria is ‘useful for fuelwood’, then a herbaceous species might score 0, while trees might score 5 (some use) to 10 (best use).

  Note that scoring is not the same as ranking; the species are not being placed in order; instead, each factor is being weighed up for each species.

  Seasonal calendars

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  Objective: document seasonal trends of species phenology (seasons of leafing, flowering and fruiting) and use.

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  Outputs: a description for each species of seasonality of appearance and use.

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  Staff: one experienced facilitator.

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  Participants: a group of local knowledgeable respondents; the aim is to achieve consensus rather than to explore differences of perception as the field guide should indicate a pattern that is helpful to the user in identifying the species.

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  Time: two hours.

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  Materials: a large sheet of paper and pens of various colours. It is also possible to make a seasonal calendar by improvising with locally available materials, such as sticks, leaves and stones. However, the facilitator will still need pen and paper in order to note the results and incorporate them later within the guide.

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  Methods: seasonal calendars begin by drawing a long line to indicate the course of the year. Events can then be marked along the line, or stones and beans may be used to show varying availability or abundance during the year. Simple line graphs can be drawn to show seasonal increases or decreases.

  Timelines or historical profiles

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  Objective: document historical trends of vegetation and species condition and use.

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  Outputs: a description of changes over time (usually over the course of living memory) of the state of the vegetation and (where possible) particular species. This provides valuable context for the introduction to the guide.

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  Staff: one experienced facilitator.

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  Participants: a group of local knowledgeable respondents; the aim is to achieve as much detail as possible, as well as consensus. Older people who have lived all of their lives in the area are especially valuable in this activity.

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  Time: two hours.

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  Materials: a large sheet of paper and pens of various colours. Alternatively, a line can be indicated on the ground, and group members write events on cards which they place at the appropriate time point on the line. This allows people to move cards around if they decide later that they need to accommodate more events or realize that events happened in a different order. The facilitator will need pen and paper in order to note the results and incorporate them later within the guide.

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  Method: people share accounts of the past, condition of the forest or other wild habitats, ecological histories, changes in land-use and species-use patterns, changes in customs and practice, and relevant changes and trends in human behaviour.

  Participatory mapping or resource mapping

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  Objective: indicate vegetation, land-use patterns and specific locations of species of interest for the guide; understand people’s perceptions of why the vegetation is that way and why species occur in those habitats. This provides useful information as context for the introduction and specific to each species.

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  Outputs: a map that indicates habitats and species, preferably with landmarks and indicators that help participants to locate those habitats and species later on for further discussion and/or botanical sampling.

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  Staff: one experienced facilitator.

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  Participants: a group of local knowledgeable respondents; the aim is to achieve as much detail as possible, as well as consensus. A range of local stakeholders who know the area in different ways through their different daily activities will work well in this activity.

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  Time: two to three hours.

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  Materials: a large sheet of paper and pens of various colours. Alternatively, the map can be drawn on the ground using locally available materials. The facilitator will need pen and paper in order to note the results for use in later field visits and interviews; often the participants will themselves want to keep the original or a copy of the map for themselves.

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  BOX 7.6 HOW TO ASSESS INFORMATION THAT YOU FIND

  ON THE INTERNET

  Great care needs to be taken with information found on the internet. Anyone can create a website and publicize their personal opinions. But it is often difficult to tell who the author is, what his or her sources were, when
it was written or revised, whether it is quoting, copying or stealing (accurately or inaccurately) from someone else, and whether it has been edited, refereed or otherwise approved by a third party.

  Don’t include information from internet sources in your field guide unless you feel confident that you know about:

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  The website itself: if it is just someone’s homepage, ask yourself why they have not published the information somewhere more reliable. A moderated discussion, where others have the chance to respond and critique information, is more reliable, as are websites of known institutions, such as universities and natural history museums.

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  The author and his or her occupation and qualifications: what does a search for their background and other work indicate about them?

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  The sources of their information (what do they tell you about them?): if the information conflicts with everything else written about this species, for example, distrust the website.

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  The reasons for putting the information on the website: does the host or the author have a bias?

  Of course, many knowledgeable people put valuable information on the internet because it is such a convenient way to communicate quickly. Take a careful approach to checking your sources and make the most of this amazing resource.

  such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Excite allow you to type in the species name and search for any information that has been put on a website. A word of warning, however: while the increase in information access over the web is exciting, there are no checks on accuracy. Anyone can put information on a website, and much of it is anecdotal and consists of one-off observations. Although such observations may be perfectly valid and correct, without the external reviewing system that applies to scientific journals, it is sometimes hard to know what you can trust from the internet. Of course, if the information is on a website of a respected institution, that helps. Box 7.6 provides some tips on the reliability of internet sources.

  Another valuable source, if you can obtain access to them, is the range of botanical databases that have been established around the world. These are often for a specific botanical group, and data is related to the scientific name of the species. The most useful, for the purposes of writing a field guide, are those which store data on the geographical distribution of plants or plant characteristics (for example, medicinal properties). Some international databases are listed in Box 7.7, and botanists at your local herbarium or university will know of any relevant ones for your area.

  Finally, herbarium labels can be a rich source of secondary information about plants. Many botanists record habitat, behaviour, details of interactions with animals or information given about the uses of the plant at the time of collection.

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  BOX 7.7 EXISTING BOTANICAL DATABASES THAT CAN HELP WITH

  NAME CHECKING AND KNOWN USES, DISTRIBUTION AND

  CONSERVATION STATUS

  Existing botanical databases include the following:

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  TROPICOS (Missouri Botanical Garden’s database):

  www.mobot.org/W3T/Search/vast.html;

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  Threatened Plant Database of the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (lists conservation status of threatened species, together with a range of other valuable databases, such as medicinal plants and tropical trees): www.unep-wcmc.org/index.htmlwww.unep-wcmc.org/cis/~main;

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  International Legume Database and Information Service (ILDIS): www.ildis.org/;

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  Survey of Economic Plants for Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (SEPASAL) (a database and enquiry service about useful ‘wild’ and semi-domesticated plants of tropical and subtropical drylands, developed and maintained at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew): www.rbgkew.org.uk/ceb/sepasal/.

  OWNERSHIP, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS

  AND COPYRIGHT

  Whenever you are working in a situation where information is passed from one person to another, for publication or possible commercial use, issues arise over ownership of the information. This may be a matter of simply taking care of professional sensitivities; but in some cases it can be a legal matter.

  Ownership of an idea is covered by intellectual property rights, which are addressed by a rapidly developing body of law, both international and national. Much of this originated from commercial interests, and the recent concern about biodiversity and intellectual property rights has arisen mainly because of the commercial use to which biodiversity information can be put. This has raised issues of social justice, particularly where indigenous people have useful knowledge about medicinal or agricultural plant uses, which has been made use of by unscrupulous corporations without due reward to the original holders of that knowledge. The situation starts from a very un-level playing field, and it is now a major concern of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and indigenous organizations to win a share of the benefits from their custodianship and knowledge of biodiversity. The situation is described in detail by Dutfield (2000). The key points for writers of field guides are to make sure that informants are aware of the use you want to make of their knowledge and agree to it (through what is known as

  ‘prior informed consent’); and to understand the law in the country of publication relating to distribution of benefits resulting from use of that knowledge. Specialists advise that it is often better from the indigenous people’s point of view to publish their knowledge so that it is clearly identified as their property, with due reward applied if commercial use is made of it. However, there are numerous complexities involved in identifying the legitimate original holders of knowledge (for example, is it the medicinal specialists in the community, the men, the women, a particular family, an individual or

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  the whole ethnic group?), and clear agreements should be obtained with any communities involved in the guide production (Laird, 2002).

  Copyright is a different and less complex matter. Copyright does not protect ideas. It protects the way in which the idea is expressed in a piece of work; but it does not protect the idea itself. So the actual form of words in the field guide, or the illustrations, are copyright, and others do not have the right to copy them for personal gain or commercial use. However, because field guides are sometimes produced with the intention of reaching as many people as possible, the authors may explicitly waive copyright with a statement at the beginning of the guide to the effect that ‘users are welcome to photocopy this guide’ or ‘users may quote the text or use the illustrations as long as this source is acknowledged’.

  Of course, the copyright works the other way round as well. If you use other authors’ published words or illustrations, make sure that you obtain permission first.

  Chapter 8 provides specific advice on copyright of illustrations.

  ACCURACY AND RELIABILITY

  Authors of any non-fiction book are concerned that the content is as accurate and reliable as possible; but with a field guide, there are a number of extra pitfalls relating to certainty over the identification of the species and the linking of information to those species. It would be quite disastrous to find out some fascinating medicinal uses of a plant and publish those under an incorrect scientific name next to the wrong illustration simply because of a muddle over local names. Therefore, particular attention needs to be paid to:

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  the steps to ascertain the scientific name;

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  the guidance on local nomenclature given above;

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  linking ancillary information on uses, ecology and cultivation to a specific plant which the authors have seen with their own eyes, and have positively identified with its scientific name, or from which they have collected voucher specimens for later identification in the herbarium (see Box 4.3, page 67, for information on how to collect voucher specimens).

  There are several aspects to accuracy, and the most relevant ones relate to th
e concepts of validity, reliability and objectivity:

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  Valid results are ones that we believe represent the ‘truth’ of the findings, and that are also applicable in other contexts or with other groups of people than the ones who provided the information. For example, if you describe a plant as useful for curing stomach ache, you want to be sure that it really does cure stomach ache, whoever uses it. If you are unable to verify the information, you can, instead, report that ‘people in such-and-such a region use the plant to cure stomach ache’.

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  Reliable results are ones that would be the same if you repeated the research again in a similar situation. For example, if you ask only a few people about the plants or you conduct your survey in a hurry, you might miss out the most knowledgeable people or annoy the informants so that they give incomplete information. Under

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  different circumstances, you might, by chance, interview other representatives of the community, more in sympathy with your objectives, who might give you different information. The only way to avoid this is to take great care over your research procedures and follow the sampling and interviewing guidelines given above.

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  Objective results have not been affected by the biases, motivations and perspectives of the researchers or facilitators. For example, a facilitator who assumed that only men know the plants because they are the ones who go to the forest might forget to interview the women of the village and, hence, overlook medicinal or nutritional information about the species.

  These criteria are often used in social research; but where participatory approaches are used, and particularly where culturally specific information about plants is to be included in the guide, authors may need to recognize that different informants or stakeholders perceive different ‘realities’. They see the natural world and the plants in different ways. Instead of finding one ‘true’ perspective on knowledge and use of the plants, a good balanced description of the different uses by different people, or in different places, is more reasonable.

  Because participatory approaches use terms such as ‘informal’ and ‘qualitative’, they are sometimes assumed to be less rigorous and accurate than more conventional social research methods. But careful attention to the process means that results can be just as reliable and valid as a more structured research approach. Jules Pretty and his colleagues (1995) have developed a list of criteria for ‘trustworthiness’ which serve as a checklist to make sure that you can trust the results of your data-gathering (see Box 7.8). The most important of these are triangulation (use of multiple sources, methods and investigators) and asking participants to check your interpretation of the results. You can also cross-check with the published literature. They point out, however, that it will never be possible to be certain about the trustworthiness criteria – all we can say is that X is trustworthy because certain things happened during and after the process of joint investigation and analysis.