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 200-2000 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, particularly field workers, with a serious interest to learn the plants, who are however not necessarily botanists, and whom will be expected to check critical plants with other reference tools, such as the herbarium and a Flora.

Arbonnier, M. 2004.. Trees, shrubs and lianas of West African dry zones. Simple format, with good colour photographs and useful introductory keys to many of the savanna plants. Not comprehensive especially for shrubs and lianas, however, so could be misleading.

Hamilton (Trees, Uganda: 1981). A useful focus on leaf details of trees, with many drawings.

Hawthorne (Trees, Ghana: 1990). All tree species (down to 5cm diameter) and diagnostic details were illustrated, with text to support. This was written part-time over 3-4 years, c. 3 person years including the 700 illustrations and field work.

Ribeiro et al. (All plants in Ducke reserve, Brazil: 1999). Dominated by colour photographs, arranged in a pictorial key-like manner, yet still includes much technical detail. In size, 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 case study, Ch. 2), Conciseness achieved by strongly limiting information per species and area of coverage.

Gardner et al. (Trees, Thailand: 2000). Rich mixture of many colour photos and line drawings.

Monro et al. (Trees, El Salvador: 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.

Corner (Trees, Malaya, 1988). Borders on being a student text.  In spite of covering an “incomplete set” of species (Box v), it is probably detailed enough, with enough species and accurate local names, to function as a complete guide to ‘wayside trees’.