African Wildlife & Environment Issue 85

FAUNA, FLORA & WILDLIFE

AFRICA has ~50,000 ‘members’ or ‘Tree Peeps’, which demonstrates just how many are interested in trees and in their identities). Tree and plant identification is generally not very easy; identifying animals is generally less challenging The basic reason why plants can be very difficult to ID is because they grow in a modular fashion and are NOT unitary organisms like animals (this point is extremely well made by the van Wyk & van Wyk in their book How to identify Trees in Southern Africa [Struik, 2019]). That being said, it is hugely rewarding and satisfying to be able to identify trees for yourself. The other way to ID a tree is to ask someone else! But by going through the ID process yourself, and getting the name, is not just fun and satisfying, but it is a learning process too… My journey has been a joy as well as being most frustrating! - at times to a point of almost despair! What bothers me most is that many professional botanists, and some of the self taught experts, who can be most skilled at tree identification, do NOT all agree on some basic issues of common concern. One matter of critical importance for me is the fact that we Tree Peeps cannot agree on a single, national, list of tree common names . Why this is so I do not know for sure, but certainly I have my own ideas. TreePeeps are unlike the ‘birders’ who have not only agreed upon a regional list of acknowledged common names, but also on an international list too! This makes all birders, whether they are professional ornithologists, twitchers, or just people like me interested in identifying the bird before them, part of an international community of bird conservationists speaking the same language! This is something sorely lacking amongst TreePeeps such that we are a disparate bunch, all going about the same business but without one voice – not, in my opinion, good for conservation! When and Why Did Tree Peeps Lose the Plot’? As I go through this series the theme of the lack of one list of tree common names will be highlighted as a negative factor again and again – unfortunately like a broken record! I contend that this lack of unification and the fact that there are disparate, and even opposing, groups of individuals, each trying to protect their own patch of turf, has

TREE IDENTIFICATION #1 OVERVIEW

THOUGHTS ON WHERE & WHY CONFUSION & CHAOS ABOUNDS. A series of personal and hopefully useful tips and guidelines to identify closely related and similar looking tree species.

Eugene Moll

Throughout my adult life I have been interested and challenged by the IDENTIFICATION of TREES IN THE FIELD - essentially by using only vegetative features . This has not only been a professional focus of mine. I have also wished to provide information for students in botany AND also for for amateur Nature lovers. This to give and enable all of those interested in trees some of the tools that may result in their being able to make more certain species identifications. I have followed this pursuit in the belief that knowledge is power , and that the informed person will value Nature such that they will also wish to conserve Nature. In so doing we should be able to build a society of ‘PEOPLE CARING FOR THE EARTH’ - that to me is synonymous with the main goal of WESSA. In these efforts I have continuously endeavoured to invent novel and different ways of capturing ideas and morphological vegetative information that will assist with making tree identification (ID) more efficient, less complex, and fun . To achieve this I have run many classroom and in-field tree ID courses; given dozens of talks; written more than 100 articles for laypeople; written & edited books; and collaborated extensively with many ( but unfortunately, not al) like-minded people. I cannot be sure what progress I and others have achieved , since tree ID is not always easy and, in some cases, almost impossible without access to flowers and/or fruiting material (and these days to genetic analysis). But I do get the impression that there are many more people interested in knowing the names of trees now, and not just the names but many other things about trees (today the Facebook site TREES IN

37 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 85 (2024)