Hi all, I am a 24 year old naturalist with an expertise in avifauna and an interest in all of the natural world. I am interested in broadening my knowledge about wild plants in my area around Cape May, New Jersey, USA. I have been doing some thinking, and I believe that I want to begin archiving a collection of specimens during my daily walks. I want to do this because I have been trying to casually learn about plants and I forget as much as I remember. I will probably become a much more active member of this forum in the future if all goes to plan. I might make a blog, though I have no experience with that yet. My goal is to become familiar with as much of the local ecosystem as possible. My plan for teaching myself how to identify plants and to classify ecosystems is this: 1. Take a field note book and take as many descriptive notes as possible. Decriptive notes on the specimen as well as the surrounding environment in every case. 2. Collect and arbitrarily label specimens (example of a name- "A1"). This will allow for organized archiving. 3. Press all specimens when possible to do so. 4. Post-field examination and study with field guides, textbooks, magnifying glass and microscope when necessary. I am curious what advice an experienced botonist could offer me. I find that learning to identify plants is much more difficult than any of my other studies. I currently own a Newcomb wildflower guide, as well as a Peterson guide to trees. I am looking for any advice, especially on recommended text,magnifying glasses/microscopes.
The Manual of the Vascular Plants of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada looks like a good manual for where you live. Learn to use the dichotomous key format. Keying out plants you already know will help. You will have to look up words in the glossary a lot, but this will help to learn the terminology. Learn to recognize plant families. Create a database for those you identify. Take photos. A good dissecting scope would also help.
Contact your local Land Grant University. Hopefully, they will have a Master Gardener clinic group somewhere near you. They can be a treasure trove of information and are more than willing to help.
You don't mention taking photos, but that's the most useful thing I can think of. Take several photos, of the whole plant or tree and then details of everything, including some with a ruler so that you have the size of petals, calyces, fruits. If you include the location in the name, and the ID when you have it, you can know where to go visit them again, and you can add the same photo to several albums based on different characteristics (using some sort of photo organizing software makes that easy). One helpful characteristic would be by family, so that when you look at the family album, you can start to recognize common characteristics.
Thank you all for the advice, it is all very helpful. I did forget to mention photographing specimens. That's a very good idea and I intend to do so. Thank you for the pointers.
Dare I say it, but improve the spelling . . . it's botanist ;-) Seriously though, an assessing professor will downgrade marks for poor spelling; accuracy in names is important in botany. Another important tip: record locations in detail. Far too much potentially valuable botanical information is rendered useless by lack of location data.
