African Wildlife & Environment Issue 78

FAUNA, FLORA & WILDLIFE

A compilation of short word descriptions and photographs of diagnostic features, demonstrating the minimum information required to identify Rhamnus prinoides with confidence. If you compare this minimalistic approach with the much more wordy descriptions in the major tree books available, and their rather poor photographs, I hope you will be convinced that with more precise, targeted information tree identification can be significantly improved.

expert panel (and not by democracy). For those who do not know about this Virtual Museum, it is a citizen science driven project ( http://thebdi.org ). For the last ten years, I have been part of a team compiling a book with the working title of Keys to Kruger’s Trees , which has taught me a great deal about tree identification in the twilight years of my life.Tree ID is one of my areas of specialization, and more than ten years ago I believed that I was something of an expert, BUT today I know that I still have much to learn. In fact, when I seriously review how good all our existing tree field guides are, I find that all, with a little rejigging, could be so much better. In fact, I find the same principle applies to all plant field guides, none of which are easy to use and one usually only gets the correct identification with great difficulty (possibly because they are written by botanists for other botanists, and not for the emerging army of citizen scientists). For conservation

to succeed, we need tools that enable all those interested in trees to be able to access their identity with certainty, reasonably quickly and easily. So, this is the current challenge for us, the people who care about the earth!

Prof Eugene Moll Department of Biodiversity and Conservation Biology University of the Western Cape emoll@telkomsa.net

22 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 78 (2021)