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It is, however, reasonably complete, and compact enough to be portable. Like many major mountain ranges, the Sierra Nevada has a unique flora, and I've found this to be a useful guide in learning about it. Overall, it's a good book for the already fairly competent amateur, but if you're a beginner, you should probably look elsewhere since this book presumes too much previous knowledge. It contains a great deal of useful information, such as species lists, some basic ecology of the sierras, and as I said, the species descriptions. It has good descriptions of the plants, but the photos are often not the best--at least in the volume I have--but they're still good enough to work with. Perhaps the plates were just getting old.
The flora seems very complete for any plant you find over 4,000 foot elevation--it won't help as much if you're in the foothills. It requires and average amount of technical skill to use, nothing that a serious amateur could easily master. An amateur may want to supplement with a Sierran plant book with photos since the line drawings in this book are simple and only illustrate a single representative genus (every genus is illustrated). This is the 1st flora I grab when I'm hiking in the Sierras and I've used them all extensively. I've used it to successfully ID several hundred plants.
Unlike most genera, the book only provides a key for this genus, and omits the usual species description that includes things like plant height that I rely on to confirm the guesses that I make from the key.I've found an unusually large number of anomalies where I suspect the book is simply wrong. This book is valuable because it's complete and compact enough to carry in a backpack. Amateurs should look elsewhere, and probably settle for something that only tries to cover the most interesting flowers. For instance, it says Lupinus adsurgens leaflets are 2-5 mm long, whereas Jepsen says they're 20-50 mm long (I suspect Jepsen is right).Experienced botanists will find this book to be a worthwhile supplement to Jepsen. Unfortunately, it has enough drawbacks that I wish someone else would write a better book to compete with it.One example of its problems is when I tried to use it to identify a daisy. The index showed no listing for daisy, so I looked through the Aster family section the hard way, and eventually found the genus Erigeron (which turned out to be indexed under "wild daisy").
The size and weight make it easy to include in a backpack or field press, although I would like a hardback for my reference shelf. The botanical keys are easy enough for amateurs to use and for professionals to key plants from memory. This book is valuable to anyone interested in natural history of the region. This book is great. It is a concise reference on an interesting flora.
Plants are identified using dichotomous keys. The second great feature of this book is that the plants are specific to the area that I was traveling through.
Eliminating that many choices made the effort much easier.I recommend the book heartily, understanding the plants and animals around us greatly enhances the experience of enjoying nature. I didn't have to separate out plants that only live in the desert or at the coast.
I found this book to be a great help identifying plants in the field. But both are heavy and difficult to use in the field for many of the genera though I did use them when I got home to check my identifications.
Many of the plants that I found can be seen at californiagardens.com Most can be identified without magnification.
I also use The Jepson Manual, Higher Plants of California and the old Munz's.
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