A Field Guide to the Families and Genera of Wood – With Supplementary Notes on Herbaceous Taxa (Columbia, Ecuador, Peru) (Paper) Paperback – Illustrated, 9 May 1996

The ultimate field guide to Neotropical plant families and genera. Although this guide is written specifically for NW S America it can be used anywhere in the Neotropics (for example Central America). Guides the user through the combinations of key characters (concentrating on sterile vegetative characters) that can allow the user to identify most woody plants to family and often genus. Vital for any field botanist operating in this region.

Probably the only flora of the Amazon (in one book) available for a reasonable price

Gentry's work is unavoidable for anyone wanting to explore north western south american flora.Good quality and delivered on time

A well written book allowing easy identification of plants even for non-botanists.

le gustó a mi novia, dice que es muy buen libro

Ausgezeichnetes Buch. Jedes Mal wenn ich etwas darin nachschlage, befällt mich die Ehrfurcht über das Wissen von A. Gentry und die verständliche Art, wie er dieses Wissen im Buch festgehalten hat.

This book is very important for a botanist planning for and visiting the rainforests of Eastern Ecuador. I spent three weeks in the regions around Tena, Ecuador (near Jatun Sacha) and consulted this text routinely for keying out and identifying specimens and learning more about the flora of this portion of the western edge of the Amazon basin.The book necessarily is heavy because of the diversity of the flora, but this paperback edition is well enough constructed to last three weeks in rainforest unscathed!Being a plant physiologist from the north temperate zone, I normally require a flower to identify a plant or to classify it into a family. I was amazed that, with this field guide, I could do as well with bark, twig, and leaf. Indeed in a tropical rainforest, unless you climb up into the canopy (a daunting task), flowers and fruits are rare. So floristic-based keys and texts would fail here. Gentry provides the scientist with a critically important text to help identify and understand the flora in a complex and high-canopied forest.My only negative criticism of this book is that the nomenclature used assumes the reader is very-well experienced with and has mastered the vocabulary in plant morphology, anatomy, and developmental botany. A high-quality glossary is needed for less-experienced readers. I took another text with me for this purpose (reviewed elsewhere).This book is highly recommended for anyone visiting the rainforests of the western Amazon basin.

I use to work with plants and trees in the tropics and this book amazing

I have field-tested this book for the last 18 years with students in tropical American forests. It literally transforms the process of identifying plants in these forests, making it possible for botanists and botany students with an understanding of plants but little experience in the tropics to break into the vastly more complex and difficult world of identifying tropical plants. It is the one book I would take to the tropics for field identification of plants. It's important to realize that this book is for work in natural vegetation --- in primary and secondary forests and forest remnants. Additionally, it focuses on trees (though it includes identification guides to things like orchids and bromeliads). It's not for identifying street trees and garden plants.