One of my undergrad majors was biology and I can still remember the expectations for one of the botany courses. For the final, we walked around campus and the prof would point at a tree or shrub and ask a question – mostly what is it. We would have to write down a response. I was pretty good at that kind of thing, but must confess the direction of my career since has not encouraged a lot of practice and I remember very little now.
We do own several plant identification books. Mostly, we seem to purchase these resources when we are on a trip and want identify what we find on hikes. Cindy has a great collection of wild flower photographs. I have a great collection of pictures of Cindy taking pictures of wild flowers.
The identification guide resources we use may soon change. I ran across this iPad app on LifeHacker and had to give it a try. LeafSnap is an electronic field guide developed by researchers from several prestigious universities that allows you to both collect and identify specimens. Here is how the systems works for trees. You take a leaf and put it on a white background and then upload the image. The system makes an attempt to identify the tree and offers options. I do think the system got my test specimen correct because the tree did have white bark was probably a birch (we were staying at the home of relatives in northeast Minnesota).
We also saw four bears walking across the road on our little road trip. I did not grab the ipad and chase them through the woods.
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