World Reference Base for Soil Resources, 4th edition: field guide and fundamental definitions

The project first traces the earliest origins of natural history writing, surveying how natural history writing from antiquity presented and categorized the living world, and then how the rise of print culture and growing popularity of natural history writing would facilitate the rise of European empires. Values and conventions emerged that would later feed into the field guide, like the pairing of text and illustration to aid identification and the decontextualizing of plants and animals from their environments. Near the end of the nineteenth century, the field guide genre emerged. Some wildly popular books, mostly written by women, emphasized the virtuousness of learning birds and plants, using a domestic rather than national organizational framework. Other early field guides emphasized learning taxonomy and were more closely aligned with scientific disciplines. Both archetypes upheld values still present in the field guide. Modern field guides have solidified Linnaean taxonomy as the default framework for understanding distinct lifeforms, but they also chronicle a growing extinction anxiety about the destructive power of humans. Modern field guides endorse consumerism, the experiencing of nature as a product. This widespread genre encapsulates the belief that through prosperity and desire, we can spread enough awareness to protect biodiversity despite our own destructive tendency. Field guides not only reflect our own values, they champion them.

A field guide is a tool to identify an object of natural history. Field guidescover a wide range of topics from plants to fungi, birds to mammals, and shells to minerals. Traditionally, field guides are books, usually small enough to be carried outdoors . They enjoy wide popularity in modern life; almost every American home and library owns at least one field guide, and the same is also true for other areas of the world. At this time, companies, non-profits, and universities are developing computertechnologies to replace printed field guides for identifying plants. This thesisexamines the state of the art in field guides for plants. First, a framework isestablished for evaluating both printed and digital field guides. Second, fourprint and three digital field guides are evaluated against the criteria. Third, anovel digital field guide is presented and evaluated.

During fall 2018, a multidisciplinary cohort of graduate students participated in a course conducted by professors Javiera Barandiarán and Mona Damluji as part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Energy Justice in Global Perspective at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For their final project, the students worked in groups to conduct place-based, site-specific research on the history and politics of oil in Santa Barbara County. Each group led a tour of a site significant to the history of oil in the region and produced a digital portfolio that contained contemporary and archival images, scans of archival documents, and observational site descriptions. The digital portfolios they compiled were then used to create the multimedia narrative and map A Field Guide to Oil in Santa Barbara. This essay contextualizes the Field Guide within the dominant narratives of oil in the Santa Barbara region, which attempt to contain oil as a naturally occurring substance of the past and not an ongoing part of the area’s role in global systems of oil extraction and capital. This collaboratively written introductory essay is at once a pedagogical reflection and a critical assessment of the field guide as a form of practice in environmental media studies. Over the past decade, field guides of various kinds have emerged across the humanities as hybrid artistic/academic projects, as outcomes of activist scholarship, and as provocations for site-responsive knowledge production. Field guides have also been used by governments and extractive industries to survey, categorize, and lay claim to resources. While acknowledging its experimental nature, this essay explores how the Field Guide is a model for interdisciplinary pedagogy and practice in environmental media studies.

D. W. Macdonald, P. Barrett. 2001. Mammals of Europe. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 312 pp. ISBN 0-691-09160-9, price (paper), $24.95. Having great respect for my old mammalian field guide (Corbet and Ovenden 1980), I took Mammals of Europe in hand with high expectations. Also, following recent comprehensive works on European mammals (Niethammer and Krapp 1978–2001; Mitchell-Jones et al. 1999), the time seemed ripe for more detailed information to be incorporated into field guides for the general public. To my satisfaction, the authors were able to upgrade the book's quality in many novel ways. This field guide describes the mammals of Europe in a most colorful way, both visually and literally. The color figures are some of the most vivid I have seen in a field guide. Although expanded species descriptions fill the field guide, the language remains enjoyable and easy to follow. In general, the appearance of the book is more appealing than previously published field guides. Besides some minor shortcomings that are …

Orchids of Palau: A field guide by Ann Hillmann Kitalong and Makoto Uesugi. Middletown, DE: The Environment, Inc., 2017. 112 pp. Soft Cover. ISBN 978-982-98016-5-4. £19.00 Micronesian orchid communities are gaining attention from researchers and enthusiasts alike (see, e.g., Raulerson & Rinehart, 1992; GPEPP, 2017; Crain, 2018), however, readily accessible field guides for many of the individual islands or archipelagos are limited in availability. Moreover, 30 to 100 years have passed since much of the literature on Micronesian orchids has been published (e.g., Schlechter, 1921; Tuyama, 1939; Fosberg & Sachet, 1987), during which time numerous changes have taken place in orchid taxonomy that have not been compiled in an easily manageable source. Orchids of Palau: A field guide proficiently fills this void for an important component of orchid diversity in Micronesia. Palau's orchid flora is rich with showy, rare, and endemic species, but given that the islands’ remarkable marine environments often overshadow potential interests in their plant communities, it is encouraging to see that their orchids are being documented and showcased for a broad audience in a convenient field guide. Following the preliminary material [Credits, Acknowledgements, Table of Contents], an Introduction is presented that includes brief sections on Physical Geography, Vegetation of the Islands, History of Palauan Orchids (which includes an interesting list of botanists that have made taxonomic contributions), The Orchid Flora, The Structure of Orchids, The Flower, The Inflorescence, The Seed Capsule, and Vegetative Morphology, most of which include color photos. The main body of the text (Species Descriptions) follows the Introduction and consists of 39 species accounts, organized alphabetically. Each account includes two sections with information on the species’ distribution and habitat (globally and locally) and a species description that includes information on synonymy (in some cases), growth form, stems, leaves, flowers, and phenology. Multiple color photographs of growth form, leaves, flowers, and capsules from co-author Makoto Uesugi and several other contributors also accompany each species account and offer sufficient detail to permit recognition of plants in the field. Although the guide is limited in that it only provides descriptions for less than half of the known orchid species in Palau, it makes up for this in part through a subsequent section of Orchid Plates that includes photos of an additional 12 species. Furthermore, a checklist of 80 recorded species follows the plates section and is a very useful element for consolidating information on the orchids specifically found in Palau. The checklist includes details on phenology (including a monthly calendar) and information on distribution status (Native, Endemic, Introduced, Invasive). The field guide concludes with a Glossary emphasizing orchid morphology and a References section. As with any first edition book, particularly those that cover subjects such as floristics and taxonomy, which are continuously in flux and subject to updates, occasional limitations and errors have inevitably found their way into the publication. In a few instances, photos appear to be captioned incorrectly (e.g., Taeneophyllum palawense, p. 13). Another limitation is that some of the more cryptic species are not included in the Species Descriptions section or in the Plates Section, making it difficult to compare and differentiate closely related species in the field based on the information and photos provided, particularly in the absence of a dichotomous key. In some cases, the taxonomic nomenclature needs to be updated as well, although some of the potential changes are currently under debate (e.g., Oberonia spp., Moerenhoutia spp.). The caption for the checklist also has some missing information for species status symbology (status G), which is omitted. Lastly, it should be noted that the phenology dataset is incomplete, something the authors recognize, and thus it only documents when a species has been observed in bloom by the authors, but not necessarily the true seasonality of the species. Nevertheless, the authors acknowledge that the guide is a work in progress and assert that they are gathering new photographs and added information on seasonality for updated volumes in the future. Despite minor issues with the first edition, I strongly recommend this field guide for any biology department or natural history institute with interests in the flora of Micronesia or southeast Asia. I believe that this book is a valuable resource for botanists focusing on the orchids or flora of Micronesia and a convenient field guide for ecotourists and natural history guides in the Republic of Palau.

Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) has developed a series of field guides to provide technical support tools for decisions regarding the evaluation of freshwater and marine shorelines and treatment options during an oil spill response. The new Freshwater Shoreline Response Guide is aligned with and complements the most recent editions of the ECCC Shoreline Cleanup Assessment Technique (SCAT) Manual (ECCC, 2018) and the ECCC Field Guide to Oil Spill Response on Marine Shorelines (ECCC, 2016). ECCC is engaged to provide science-based information to the spill response community and develop an expertise in spill response. The purpose of the Freshwater Shoreline Response Field Guide is to provide advice and guidance on the protection and treatment of freshwater shorelines threatened or affected by an oil spill. This Field Guide focuses on conventional tactics normally available to responders and appropriate for freshwater shoreline environments. The content of the Field Guide is organized to describe key elements of: Health and safety for field teamsNet Environmental Benefit Analysis (NEBA) / Spill Impact Mitigation Assessment (SIMA)Freshwater environmentsOil fate and behaviour in freshwater environmentsResponse – planning, treatment, special topics, and completion and monitoring

P.S. Auerbach H.J. Donner E. Weiss Field Guide to Wilderness Medicine, 3rd Edition 2008 Mosby 944 pages, $42.95 ISBN: 978-1-4160-4698-1

A Study of Cultural Bias in Field Guide Determinations of Mushroom Edibility Using the Iconic Mushroom, Amanita muscaria, as an Example. Mushroom field guides teach identif- ication skills as well as provide information on the edible or toxic qualities of each species of wild mushroom. As such they function as modern-day village elders for an increasingly urban, nature-ignorant population. This paper identifies underlying cultural bias in the determination of mushroom edibility in English-language field guides, using the iconic mushroom, Amanita muscaria, as an example. We explore a selection of ethnographic and medical texts that report the use of A. muscaria as a food, and we accept parboiling as a safe method of detoxifying it for the dinner table. Mushroom field guides, however, almost universally label the mushroom as poisonous. We discuss the cultural underpinnings and literary form of mushroom field guides and demonstrate that they work within a mostly closed intellectual system that ironically shares many of the same limitations of cultural bias found in traditional folk cultures, but with the pretense of being modern and scientific.

The American, Roger Tory Peterson, has been the single most influential figure in the evolution of birding field guides around the world. He was also a major contributor to the awakening of an environmental consciousness among the wider public in the second half of the twentieth century. In Australia, he provided a powerful impetus to the renovation of the field guide genre from the 1960s onward; and his Australian followers, like Peterson himself, were driven by a conviction that field guides are potent contributors to the conservationist cause. This article explores the myriad ways in which Peterson helped shape Australian birding field guides, including an exposition of his personal friendship with one of Australia’s major field guide authors, Graham Pizzey.

Field guides, a wildly popular genre found in millions of homes throughout the United States and around the world, form a common initial point of entry for people with even a passing desire to enhance their understanding of the environment. Ecocriticism has since its emergence as a discipline operated under the guiding principle that the ways environments are depicted in literature and other media influence how humans conceive of and interact with those environments. As Cheryll Glotfelty wrote in her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader: “Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of language and literature … as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the nonhuman” (xix). Field guides mediate the conceptualization of the nonhuman for millions of humans and are thus a rich subject area for ecocritical inquiry. In this essay I examine how the genre of the field guide has shaped environmental habits and modes of thinking in the U.S., which have in turn circulated to other parts of the world.

Phillipps, Q., and K. Phillipps. 2016. Phillipps’ Field Guide to the Mammals of Borneo and Their Ecology: Sabah, Sarawak, Brunei, and Kalimantan. John Beaufoy Publishing Ltd., Oxford, United Kingdom, 400 pp. ISBN 9780691169415, $27. For anyone interested in Asian tropical ecology and mammalogy, the new “Phillipps’ Field Guide to the Mammals of Borneo and Their Ecology” is one of those books that you want to have at least 2 copies of. One copy can safely sit on your book shelves for occasional referencing and enjoyments of its excellent texts and illustrations. The other you take with you on any of your Borneo trips; it gets dirty and worn being frequently grabbed out of wet back packs in your haste to identify that species you just encountered. This is how I used the original Mammals of Borneo by Payne et al. (1985), with one copy now barely recognizable as a book, patched by various types of duct and other forms of tape, and a few pages unfortunately missing. Quentin Phillipps and Karen Phillipps have done a great job reworking Payne et al. (1985) into a better illustrated and more informative field guide. Compared to the original book, the present version is not just an excellent guide for the identification of Bornean mammals, but also has a very useful succinct description of the ecology of Bornean forests, their mammals, and the plants and others species with which these mammals interact. Thus, it presents mammals as an integral part of Bornean ecosystems, allowing readers to understand why they look or act in certain ways, and how they fit into Borneo’s intricate ecological networks. The importance of illustrated field guides such as this one cannot be underestimated. For example, to date, no one has taken the initiative to comprehensively describe and illustrate the mammal species of Sumatra, Java, or Sulawesi; hence there are still no useful field guides for these Indonesian islands with their rich mammalian faunas and high endemicity. Without accurate guides to species identification, how … Borneo Futures, Country Woods 306, Jalan WR Supratman, Pondok Ranji-Rengas, Ciputat 15412, Tangerang Selatan, Indonesia; e-mail: emeijaard{at}gmail.com

Implied Narrative Claudia Smith (bio) The Rose Metal Press Field Guide To Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field. Edited by Tara L. Masih. Rose Metal Press. http://www.rosemetalpress.com. 168 pages; paper, $15.95. The cover of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction resembles the old field guides from off my grandparents' bookshelves, with Audubon-looking pictures of natural things...covers that in my memory always seemed to be illustrations of birds. This field guide is no exception; the birds are there. Rose Metal Press, in providing a guide for students and teachers, is filling a void and breaking some new territory. It's an ambitious undertaking. Tara L. Masih's thorough introduction, at twenty-five pages, might at first seem rather long, but it sets the tone for the rest of the guide. There isn't anything, as far as I know, like this book out there yet, and so some sober discussion feels necessary. Masih's introduction traces the history of the short short, all the way to its present form, and provides the backbone of these essays. "What The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction attempts is to take this rather wild-running flash adolescent and settle it down a bit to get a better understanding of its past, present, and future," Masih writes. And that is just what this guide proceeds to do, in twenty-five short, accessible essays from writers in the field. All but the last essay, written by Ron Carlson, are followed by an example of the form and a writing exercise. Like a field guide, this book is browsable and accessible, as well as illuminating to the layman, the novice, the aspiring writer, the old teacher. Like two solid bookends, Pamela Painter's essay introduces, and Ron Carlson's concludes. Painter makes the case that writing exercises "can be as important to a writer as exercises are to an aspiring musician or singer" and argues that such exercises can be fruitful to novices and masters alike. Painter writes about her own experience with prompts, and [End Page 25] her realization that the only thing artificial about a prompt is the prompt itself. The essay informs the others, providing some insights into what these prompts are for, and how far reaching they can be. When I was a young student, I thought of published, professional writers as existing in some perfect, static place. They had done their exercises and were beyond me. Then I became one and realized just how messy we still get, how we constantly reach for our tools. Painter describes how spilled seltzer becomes the inspiration for a short. Then she presents her own draft—imperfect and in need of revision. This strikes me as a particularly good move on her part, as a teacher. Students reading will be reminded that writers continue to draft, to work, to revise, to evolve, no matter the age or experience. This isn't just a book about flash; it is also a teaching book. And as such, I think it's an effective one. As I responded to some of the exercises provided, I thought about just how idiosyncratic teaching and the process of writing can be. Some of my favorite essays were followed by prompts that turned into something wildly different for me. Sherrie Flick's call to write outside time's boundaries is followed by the wonderfully quirky exercise "Writing A Warped Encyclopedia Entry." The exercise is followed by her "Oklahoma Men," a short where Oklahoma men seem suspended in a magical, precise world of their own. I tried this exercise, and it rendered a story that veered away from the strange flat world of Oklahoma men to something more character driven. But it worked. As Painter recognizes, what emerges from these exercises becomes "organically your own." I did not attempt Lex Williford's exercise, which seems particularly suited to the classroom. Williford gets his fingertips inky and asks his students to generate their own inkblots. He bases his exercise on the Rorschach test; after searching for images in the blots, writers think about ten images, then...

BioTechniquesVol. 41, No. 4 WebWatchOpen AccessWebWatchKevin AhernKevin AhernSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:21 May 2018https://doi.org/10.2144/000112278AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInReddit Doing DrugsIt's not difficult to find online data bases containing pharmaceutical info. A little Googling leads easily to molecular structures, lab tests, patents, side effects, and much miscellany. What's not so easy to find is a database that links drugs with data and the proteins being targeted. Fortunately, that important niche is occupied by David Wishart's DrugBank. The list of compounds in the database is impressive—over 3000 experimental compounds, greater than 1000 FDA-approved small molecules, 113 FDA-approved protein/peptides, 60+ nutraceuticals, and over 6000 protein targets (complete with sequences). Wideranging research data on each molecule is organized tidily on a “card” and much of that is cross-linked to records in related databases. If you could only go to one place to access drug data, DrugBank would be an excellent choice.@ redpoll.pharmacy.ualberta.ca/drugbank/index.htmlProper IDsYou're out in the field, and you spot a really interesting looking tropical plant. It's not one you're familiar with, and the printed field guide you own doesn't list it. What to do? To the rescue comes the Virtual Field Herbarium (VFH) complete with its gallery of thousands of images of plants. The subjects of most photos in the collection are available as herbarium specimens, and the original photographer or collector of each is known, so questionable identifications can be readily rechecked. Recognizing that no single field guide can be everything to everyone, VFH goes way beyond the standard reference, with tips on designing personalized field guides and then to “make it happen,” provides an extensive set of links/listings to existing field guides and relevant information. Its bibliography alone, with over 800 entries, is a bonanza for tropical botanists.@ herbaria.plants.ox.ac.uk/vfhBig Field MicroscopeWith content areas that span news, images, education, historical documents, taxonomic indexing of organisms, and others, it's not much of an exaggeration to describe Micro*scope as the mother of all microscopy sites on the web. Designed with a relaxed taxonomic approach to managing organism information, the site is loosely hierarchical in its organization so as to allow visitors the maximum likelihood of easily finding desired info. Collections can be browsed alphabetically, by topic, or by concept. Organisms can similarly be viewed alphabetically or by classification. Micro*scope appears to be meeting with great success, if the recent addition of its 10,000th image is any indication.@ starcentral.mbl.edu/microscope/portal.phpCellular CommunicationSupported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Alliance for Cell Signaling (AfCS) has some heavy hitters behind it and with good reason—the group's goals are to “understand as completely as possible the relationships between sets of inputs and outputs in signaling cells that vary both temporally and spatially.” In a word, it's all about communication—both cellular and scientific. For scientists, there are full-length research reports and mini-communications about signaling that are freely available to visitors. With respect to cellular messaging, databases are available on very diverse signaling-related topics, including yeast two-hybrid analyses, antibodies, plasmids, phosphoproteins, and covalent modification. A signaling gateway puts frosting on the cake with up-to-the-minute news on this important topic.@ www.afcs.orgBusy HighwaysIn the middle of Los Angeles, surrounded by a bewildering array of freeways pointed in all directions, you wouldn't dream of getting around without a map, so shouldn't scientists hoping to navigate the “interstate” pathways of cellular information also have some assistance? Enter Pathguide, the pathway resource list, which serves as a sort of super Rand McNally for scientists traveling across intracellular molecular freeways. With links to over 220 molecular “highways,” Pathguide guides users to databases covering protein-protein interactions, metabolic pathways, signaling pathways, pathway diagrams, regulatory networks, protein-compound interactions, genetic interaction networks, and sequences of interest.@ www.pathguide.org/index.phpFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Vol. 41, No. 4 Follow us on social media for the latest updates Metrics History Published online 21 May 2018 Published in print October 2006 Information© 2006 Author(s)PDF download

This is No. 12 in the well-known Peterson Field Guide Series. Accordingly, it needs little introduction to anyone who is familiar with preceding field guides of this series such as those to birds, butterflies, animal tracks, etc. This book is somewhat more than a field guide for identifying reptiles and amphibians. author states that nine times out of ten the reader will have his specimen at hand before he attempts identification and we might add that many times the reader will desire to keep his catch at least for short periods of time once identification has been effected. Conant has wisely included information of interest to the professional and layman alike on the care and handling of reptiles and amphibians both in the field and in captivity. first four chapters (28 pages) are entitled Introduction, Making and Transporting the Catch, Care in Captivity, About the Snake-Bite Each is well-written and the latter three are illustrated with full page photographs showing techniques for handling reptiles (poisonous and non-poisonous) and amphibians. Drawings of tools for catching and transporting, as well as illustrations of living quarters for small captive specimens are included. author gives a classic retort to his question What About the Snake-Bite Problem? in the lead sentence to this chapter: The best answer is not to get bitten. This answer is supported by the fact that most people are bitten through carelessness. A full page plate illustrates first aid for poisonous snake bite. Each species or subspecies is treated under the following headings in the text: Identification. Similar Species, Voice (when pertinent), and Range. This book contains the finest color plates (24 full pages) of reptiles and amphibians ever assembled under one cover for $3.95 and the illustrator, Isabelle Hunt Conant, is to be highly commended for her outstanding achievement in reproducing color from live animals. Unfortunately in some cases the diagnostic value of the indicating lines of the Peterson Series has been lost in reduction. Most readers would probably have difficulty in identifying the Texas Map Turtle, Graptemys versa, from Plate 8 even though advised to examine closely for the horizontal or J-shaped line behind eye. animals depicted in any one plate are all headed in more or less the same direction, the attainment of which must have been a constant exercise in patience for author and illustrator. hellbenders (Plate 35) and the narrow mouth toads (Plate 39) provide two of several refreshing exceptions which are not in the least considered adversely by this reviewer. A notable handicap to anyone interested in the information that the scientific name conveys is that scientific names are not included with common names on both plates ;nd range maps. This is most regrettable, for common names of reptiles and amphibians are far from stable even though there is some progress toward stability as present. reader is thus forced to thumb back to the text to inform himself that the Cheat Mountain Salamander is Plethodon richmondi nettingi if this information was not conveyed by the salamander's photograph or its distributional map. One can hardly justify this omis-

A set of stable simple common bird names helps non-ornithologist birders, who contribute to conservation by visiting protected areas and participating in citizen science projects. Changes in English bird names have caused discomfort in the local birding community, especially those that followed international standardisation of common bird names between 2000 and 2005. To understand the extent and nature of English bird name changes, an analysis was done of all southern African bird names through the eight editions of Roberts Birds of South/Southern Africa field guides published from 1940 to 2016. Of 813 species listed in both the first and the latest of the field guides, 453 (55.7%) had their names changed, among which 108 (13.3%) had changes in both the group name and the species epithet. The greatest single wave of changes (31.4%) occurred in the first ‘Roberts bird guide’ (the seventh field guide) in 2007, following international standardisation. Mean word and syllable counts of bird names also increased significantly in that edition. Name changes were associated with new authorships, taxonomic changes and use of geographic species epithets. There was a trend towards name stability for southern African endemic species. Further name changes should be kept to a minimum, shortening and simplifying wherever possible.