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A Guide to Field Guides

moss
December 03, 2024

A Guide to Field Guides

A research paper I wrote for an English course.

moss

December 03, 2024
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  1. Lindgren 1 Nic Lindgren 11/23/2024 ENC 1102 Dr. Barnickel A

    Guide to Field Guides There’s a lot of different kinds of plants in the world. So many that most people need tools to help identify and name the ones they see. Field guides are a common example of this sort of tool, yet it’s impossible for just one field guide to cover every plant one may come across. This results in many different field guides as well, though less than the number of plants. There’s a good variation in them too, and not just in the areas of plant species they cover. Field guides have varying structures, imagery, and wording, but they are all still recognizable under the genre of “field guide,” which can be generally defined as a restricted checklist used to identify plants in the field, varying in form but most commonly a book (Farnsworth 891; Hawthorne 655). So, how do different field guides for wild plants use structure, language, vocabulary, iconography, and rhetorical devices to help identify plants and their uses? While researching this, I found that there weren’t many others asking the same question, so in writing this paper I hope to compile the findings of others I did happen across, along with my own observational research of a handful of field guides. Literature Review As mentioned, plant field guides come in many different forms, but they are all still recognizable as field guides, whether they’re digital or analog, professional or casual. Genres evolve to reflect a community’s values (Clary-Lemon 159), which can be seen in how, while they can vary, all field guides have a recognizable structure. A more detailed definition of a field
  2. Lindgren 2 guide would be a taxonomically organized checklist containing

    detailed descriptions accompanied by illustrations or images (Farnsworth 891). The prose in a field guide can vary in jargon depending on its audience. For example, a field guide intended for use by professional botanists will use more complex terms that said audience will be familiar with, as opposed to field guides aimed towards public or amateur use, which would use more accessible language. The article “Next-Generation Field Guides” by Elizabeth J. Farnsworth goes into detail about various forms of field guides, the methods they use, their importance, and ways to create them. In talking about new methods arising in the creation of field guides, another source I looked at is mentioned within this article; a great incidental instance of intertextuality. “First Steps toward an Electronic Field Guide for Plants” by Guarav Agarwal is cited by Farnsworth, which talks about the process of this team’s efforts to create an electronic field guide called Leafsnap. They are utilizing 3D models and digital images as well as advanced search engines, including a system that can automatically determine which plant a leaf belongs to just by using a photo. This database is very accessible to the public in being a free app, and uses easy to understand language. I found the unique medium for this field guide very compelling for the genre, as it was one of the only fully online field guides I found while researching. Another unique field guide I found in my research is talked about in an article by Megan Franks. It describes the process of a Central Texas charter school's fourth and fifth-grade science classes' creation of a field guide for their local plants. In the year the article describes, the classes focused on the plants of the local Blackwater Prairie. Franks goes on to explain the processes by which the students created their guides, as well as the educational goals and benefits. It also includes the rubric they used, and encourages other schools and educators to take inspiration from this project.
  3. Lindgren 3 I found this example very compelling, because while

    it is a less accurate or professional means of creating a field guide, they still follow the same or similar format and methods of research when doing so. This provides insight to key parts of the structure that makes a plant field guide recognizable as such, like pictures, descriptions, and facts. Albeit college age, another field guide created by students is one talked about by Frederica Bowcutt. Her article describes the process by which Evergreen State College students created a field guide for plants of the camas prairies in the Puget Sound area of Washington in order to support efforts for Indigenous food sovereignty as well as ones for ecological restoration. The article also describes the idea of “decolonizing botanical knowledge,” and how this project is meant to help students in doing so. This article not only describes the process in making their field guide, but includes lots of intertextual and interdisciplinary topics such as anti- colonialism and historical ecology. An article by William Rubel also has some interesting interdisciplinary points. It focuses on mushroom field guides, and how the information within them can vary depending on where the guide is from. Specifically, it talks about the edibility and toxicity of the mushroom Amanita muscaria, and how it is widely labeled and written off as highly poisonous and inedible, despite the fact that it does have uses if prepared properly. It’s discussed how this, along with other similar instances, is due to cultural biases and ideas about what is edible and what isn’t. While this article focuses on mushroom field guides, I’m sure these biases can be found in plant field guides as well, and the intersection of cultural bias and science is an interesting influence on the content within a field guide. Circling back to the form and structure of field guides, “Empirical Trials of Plant Field Guides” by W.D. Hawthorne describes research about how different formats of three image- based field guides can affect the identification accuracy of the plants they include. It starts off by
  4. Lindgren 4 defining plant field guides as “books or electronic

    resources used to identify plants, primarily in the field.” The guides they tested were for plants in the tropical forests of Ghana, Grenada, and Cameroon, and were tested with local residents and some botanists from the United Kingdom. They tested different image formats, including drawings, photographs, and paintings, and compared the users’ accuracy to their accuracy when only using their prior knowledge. The usability and beauty of each variation was also tested, the results of which were that digital color photos were ranked the highest. They also found that there was not a significant difference in identification accuracy between image formats, with the exception of drawings yielding less accurate identifications in Grenada. The experiment detailed in this article touches on some of the core features that make a plant field guide, since it discusses differences in the visual part of the formatting. The results of this article help me prove that variation in the formatting of a guide doesn’t necessarily impact its credibility. I saved this article for last because while it doesn’t directly relate to field guides, it has proved very useful in helping me identify and critically think about intertextuality. Frank J. D’Angelo’s “The Rhetoric of Intertextuality” is an essay about intertextuality and rhetoric within nontraditional genres and concepts. It talks about different modes of intertextuality and where they appear, as well as the traits of each mode. This article/essay was helpful to me as I am doing an analysis of a less traditional genre, and helped me to more easily discuss intertextuality in plant field guides. Methods For my primary data, I decided to make observations of a handful of field guide examples that I found both online and in real life. For the physical guides, I actually own several that were given to me as gifts, which is what prompted the genre for my research question. Some were
  5. Lindgren 5 found in secondhand bookstores, but they’re all available

    for purchase online as well, and I’m sure some, if not all, could be found in libraries. The physical books I used were Stan Tekiela’s Trees of the Carolinas Field Guide, and Lee Allen Peterson’s A Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants. I actually own two guides by Peterson, but they were very similarly formatted (as is to be expected), so I chose only to use one of them so as to not skew my data in any particular way. For the online books, as well as all of my secondary sources, I used the University of Central Florida’s library search to find free online copies of them. The online books I referenced were Peter Del Tredici and Steward T. A Pickett’s Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide, James Stubbendieck, et al.’s North American Wildland Plants: A Field Guide, and Roland Keller’s A Field Guide to Tropical Plant Families. Once I decided on which field guides I would use, as there were several I decided against since they weren’t focused solely on plants, I went through all of them and recorded different traits they contained. These traits were the types of images and iconography used, the text vs. image placement, and whether they contained supplementary materials, such as keys and glossaries. I also recorded whether they contained elements I observed as being present in most of the examples I’ve looked at. That list consisted of: Common & Latin name, Image(s), Family, Height or Size, Habitat and/or Range, and Additional Facts. All of these would be present on each identification page or pages. I coded all of this information into tables, which I have included at the end of this research paper. Results In analyzing the formatting of the guides I chose, while there are variations, all of them contained common & Latin names, images, habitat and/or range, and additional facts on each section of identification. Of my list of common elements, only family and height/size weren’t present among all of the examples, with each only having one separate outlier guide each. Of
  6. Lindgren 6 these results, I was surprised that not every

    guide had the height/size clearly stated for the identification information, although it is to be noted that the guide that was missing it was the one guide that focused more on plant families than individual species. Family identification being missing from a guide was less surprising to me, as it doesn’t seem to be a major player in the identification of individual plants. I was actually more surprised that it wasn’t missing from more than one of the guides I looked at, so maybe it’s a more important trait than I think. Looking at the iconography, all of the guides contained visual aids alongside text descriptions. Among the visual aids, I found that color and photographs were the most common, with four out of five containing at least one section of photo images. Additionally, guides featuring colorless illustrations often contained supplemental close-ups of parts of the plant, providing additional detail to help with the lack of color. Guides that had an additional focus on identifying plants in the same family (Keller; Stubbendieck) had images of examples or traits they were describing as being present across multiple plants, such as close-ups on how leaves connect to the stems. Three out of five of the examples only had one plant featured on each spread of pages, with all of the textual information being on one side, and the image or images on the other. The exceptions to this were Keller’s guide and Peterson’s guide. Keller’s contained images and information mixed together irregularly, with the images captioned separate from the bulk of the text. Peterson’s had information/text for multiple plants on the left pages, and the corresponding illustrations (and photos in one section) on the right. Something I found interesting while researching was that a good handful of the field guides I was looking at had additional resources included in the book. While appendices weren't in my original list of traits to observe, I decided it was worth it to include since so many had them. Nearly all of my guides had glossaries and keys, with four out of five for each, and all of
  7. Lindgren 7 them had at least one other additional resource.

    For example, two of them contained species checklists for personal use, and the others had various informational addendums. This data point was the most fun discovery to me, because it reminded me that these field guides are being made to share knowledge with people and provide them with beneficial information. It feels like a nice moment of human connection to me. Discussion So, how do these results show how different field guides for wild plants use structure, language, vocabulary, iconography, and rhetorical devices to help identify plants and their uses? In my first data point, where I had the checklist of essential traits for field guides, the presence of nearly all of them in every example I looked at confirmed to me that these are the base elements of a field guide. Specifically, common & Latin names, images, habitat and/or range, and additional facts seem to be the most important traits, as they were present in all field guides I looked at. This is also reflected in the field guides of Blackwater Prairie that the elementary schoolers made in Franks’ article, where the kids included pictures, descriptions, and facts about the plants they found (23). The Evergreen State College students from Bowcutt’s article also included all of these things, with more consistency than the elementary students in mentioning size and habitat (22). Another significant observation I made was the variation in visual aids, including the different combinations of them. W.D. Hawthorne’s “Empirical Trials of Plant Field Guides” found that, within their research groups, there was not a significant difference in identification accuracy between the image formats they tested (661). Despite this, the guides I observed had a bias to photos, with even one that featured illustrations still having a section for colored photos. This suggests to me that colored photographs might be a more effective aid to identifying plants
  8. Lindgren 8 than black and white images. There may be

    other factors at play here, however, such as printing or commission costs, accessibility to photos vs. illustrations, and various other limitations. The organization of information within a field guide seems to vary, with some guides having multiple species on each spread of pages, while others only feature one. The common thread I observed was that the bulk of the text information was generally grouped separate from the visual aids, usually on the opposing page. In the field guide by the students at Evergreen State College, illustrations and textual information are shown on the same page, but are still visually separated from each other by having the illustration to either the right or the left of the block of text (Bowcutt 22). The separation of text from imagery makes a field guide much more clear and easy to read than the alternative, and while this doesn’t technically correlate to the identification of plants, it makes the guide easier to use, which in turn will lead to better identification. Conclusion In answering my research question, I found that common & Latin names, images, habitat and/or range, and additional facts seem to be the most important traits for a field guide to include to help its user identify plants and their uses. In terms of the visual aids, the guides I observed had a bias to photos, suggesting to me that colored photographs might be a more effective aid to identifying plants than black and white images. Additionally, I found that the text and imagery always had a degree of separation in the organization of pages, leading to better visual clarity, and in turn, easier identification of the plants featured. Something I was interested in looking further into but never got around to was the variation in language/diction/vernacular between field guides. All guides use some amount of scientific vocabulary, but I noticed that some contain sections that are a bit more casually worded, such as when listing additional facts. On the flip side, some field guides are much more
  9. Lindgren 9 scientifically worded and thus are harder to understand

    by the general public. Some examples of this would be the online field guide mentioned in Farnsworth and Agarwal’s articles, and the field guide by Keller, although that one was still mostly understandable to me, a non-botanist. On a similar note, I would love to see thoughts on this from someone better versed in botany than I. There’s a lot more information that I’m glancing over, both unintentionally and because I don’t have a deep enough understanding of it. There’s certainly a lot more to be said on this subject, but not by me.
  10. Lindgren 10 Works Cited Agarwal, Gaurav, et al. “First Steps

    toward an Electronic Field Guide for Plants.” Taxon, vol. 55, no. 3, 2006, pp. 597–610. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/25065637. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024. Bowcutt, Frederica. “Creation of a Field Guide to Camas Prairie Plants with Undergraduates: Project-Based Learning Combined with Epistemological Decolonization.” Ethnobiology Letters, vol. 12, no. 1, 2021, pp. 21–31. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48646118. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024. Clary-Lemon, Jennifer, Derek Mueller, and Kate Pantelides. “Research and the Rhetorical Forms it Takes.” Try This: Research Methods for Writers. WAC Clearinghouse, Colorado University Press, 2000, pp. 155-165. D’Angelo, Frank J. “The Rhetoric of Intertextuality.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 2010, pp. 31–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25655982. Accessed 29 Sept. 2024. Farnsworth, Elizabeth J., et al. “Next-Generation Field Guides.” BioScience, vol. 63, no. 11, 2013, pp. 891–99. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2013.63.11.8. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024. Franks, Megan, and Rebecca Vore. “How to Make a Plant Field Guide: Students Discover the Biodiversity of Plants in Their Surroundings.” Science and children vol. 47, no. 5, 2010, p. 21. Gale Academic OneFile Select, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A216960386/EAIM?u=orla57816&sid=bookmark- EAIM&xid=f3d9898d. Accessed 29 Sept. 2024.
  11. Lindgren 11 Hawthorne, W. D., et al. “Empirical Trials of

    Plant Field Guides.” Conservation Biology, vol. 28, no. 3, 2014, pp. 654–62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24480327. Accessed 29 Sept. 2024. Keller, Roland. A Field Guide to Tropical Plant Families. 1st ed. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023. Web. Peterson, Lee Allen. A Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants. Illustrated by Roger Tory Peterson et al., Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977. Print. Rubel, William, and David Arora. “A Study of Cultural Bias in Field Guide Determinations of Mushroom Edibility Using the Iconic Mushroom, Amanita Muscaria, as an Example.” Economic Botany, vol. 62, no. 3, 2008, pp. 223–43. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40390460. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024. Stubbendieck, James et al. North American Wildland Plants: A Field Guide. Third edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Web.
  12. Lindgren 12 Data Coding Tables Data Point 1: Observation of

    if the guide contains the most commonly shared elements of a field guide. Title/Author Common & latin name Image(s) Family Height or size Habitat and/or range Additional facts Lee Allen Peterson. A Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Peter Del Tredici and Steward T. A Pickett. Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes James Stubbendieck, et al. North American Wildland Plants: A Field Guide Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Roland Keller. A Field Guide to Tropical Plant Families Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes
  13. Lindgren 13 Stan Tekiela. Trees of the Carolinas Field Guide

    Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Data Point 2: Observation of text vs. image placement across five field guide books. Title/Author Placement Color? Lee Allen Peterson. A Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants Information/text for multiple plants on the left pages, corresponding illustrations/photos on the right Mainly no Peter Del Tredici and Steward T. A Pickett. Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide Information/text on left pages, corresponding photos on the right. Most images are captioned. One plant per spread. Yes James Stubbendieck, et al. North American Wildland Plants: A Field Guide Information/text on right pages, corresponding illustrations on the left. One plant per spread, contains text on the illustration pages as well. No Roland Keller. A Field Guide to Tropical Plant Families Images and information are mixed together irregularly. The images are captioned separate from the bulk of the text. Mainly yes
  14. Lindgren 14 Stan Tekiela. Trees of the Carolinas Field Guide

    Information/text on right pages, corresponding illustrations on the left. One plant per spread. Yes Data Point 3: Observation of types of images and iconography used between five field guide books. Note: I’m defining icons here as small, repeated graphic elements that are used to convey the same thing throughout the guide. Title/Author Image type Color? Icons? Lee Allen Peterson. A Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants Mainly line illustrations, but contains a section of color photographs. Mainly no Yes Peter Del Tredici and Steward T. A Pickett. Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide Photographs Yes No James Stubbendieck, et al. North American Wildland Plants: A Field Guide Detailed illustrations No Yes Roland Keller. A Field Guide to Tropical Plant Families Mainly photographs, some illustrations Mainly yes No
  15. Lindgren 16 Data Point 4: Observation of additional educational material

    (keys, glossaries, etc.) between five field guide books. Title/Author Key(s)? Glossary? Other Lee Allen Peterson. A Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants Yes; One in front and one in back, plus a symbol guide Yes, in the front Contains section for when/where to find plants, plus a section for food uses Peter Del Tredici and Steward T. A Pickett. Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide No Yes, in the back Several informational appendix sections, most key-like being a list of “Key Characteristics of Important Plant Families” James Stubbendieck, et al. North American Wildland Plants: A Field Guide Yes, in the front Yes, in the back Contains a species checklist for personal use. Roland Keller. A Field Guide to Tropical Plant Families Yes, about 6, all in the front No Contains a section about evolutionary trends at the end. Stan Tekiela. Trees of the Carolinas Field Guide Yes, in the front Yes, in the back Contains a species checklist for personal use.