11/12/2002

AU Forestry Prof Adds Color to Regional Tree ID Textbook

AUBURN, Ala. — If you can see the forest but you can’t name the trees, an Auburn University forestry professor has just what you need.

It’s Forest Trees: A Guide to the Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic Regions of the United States, a comprehensive, photo-filled guidebook that describes in detail 239 tree species commonly found in forests from north Florida to Pennsylvania. Though designed as a textbook for college courses in dendrology — the study of trees — the book is now being hailed as an essential tree identification tool for foresters, botanists, teachers, naturalists, landscape designers and tree enthusiasts in general.

Forest Trees is the work of Lisa J. Samuelson, a tree physiology researcher and associate professor in AU’s School of Forestry and Wildlife Services, and Michael Hogan, Samuelson’s husband and the book’s photographer. The husband/wife team worked for three years to produce the textbook, which they hope, with its minimal use of technical language and abundant use of quality color photographs, will be significantly more interesting and user-friendly than comparable books on the market.

“Our goal was to produce an easy-to-use resource, not just for students and professionals, but for the general public as well,” Samuelson says. “We wanted it to be the kind of book that would be so helpful in tree identification that forestry students would want to keep it for future reference instead of selling it back to the bookstore as soon as the course was over.”

As a tree physiologist and veteran dendrology professor, Samuelson long had been dissatisfied with the selection of available dendrology textbooks—books with lackluster black-and-white photos and line drawings and an overabundance of technical terminology and text. Still, Samuelson probably never would have taken on the task of writing a new textbook had not book publisher Prentice Hall approached her with the idea.

The company originally proposed the book as a black-and-white guide to forest trees nationwide. Samuelson and Hogan, who is a carpenter by trade and a photographer by hobby, eventually convinced the publisher to limit the book’s scope to the Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic states and to upgrade to detailed color photographs in order to make the book a more effective guide.

Forest Trees actually is an expanded version of Samuelson’s “Trees of Alabama and the Southeast Website,” a popular page which debuted in 1999 and which features brief descriptions of 100 trees common to this region of the country, along with detailed color photos by Hogan. The site, located at www.sfws.auburn.edu/samuelson/dendrology, is partially funded by the School’s Center for Forest Sustainability, an Alabama Agriculture Experiment Station-supported program.

In producing Forest Trees, Hogan took an estimated 5,000 photographs—15 big-ringed binders full—of trees and parts of trees. He took a large number of the pictures in the Donald D. Davis Arboretum on the Auburn campus, although some required traveling as far as Washington, D.C. For Hogan, his profession as a self-employed carpenter was crucial to his participation in the Forest Trees project.

“If I’d had a ‘regular’ job, I couldn’t have done it, because we had to be extremely flexible,” he says. “When a tree was at a certain stage we wanted to photograph, we had to be able to go right then to take the picture, or risk having to wait another year.”

The 800-plus photos that wound up in Forest Trees include overall shots of each tree species, along with detailed photographs of the leaves, twigs, flowers, fruit and bark.

Photographs claim one page of the two-page spread devoted to each tree species. Opposite the photos is Samuelson’s concise, easy-to-grasp text, which provides such information as the common and botanical names of each tree and the habitat in which it grows, along with terse descriptions of key leaf, twig, bark, flower and fruit features — all of which will help users easily identify differences between similar species.

The text for each tree also includes an innovative “uses” section, which gives readers insight into the tree’s commercial and ecological functions. Uses for the longleaf pine, for instance, range from construction lumber and turpentine to a food source for birds and small mammals.

The overall result of the Samuelson-Hogan effort is a book that gives readers strong written and visual demonstrations of key features of each species and makes field identification easy.

The book’s first full printing was not completed until mid-September—too late for use in most college dendrology courses. As author, though, Samuelson got enough advance copies to use in her current dendrology class at Auburn. Early student reaction to the book has been positive; Samuelson will ask the students to evaluate Forest Trees as a textbook at semester’s end.

In addition to dendrology, Samuelson also teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in the ecophysiology of forest trees, or how the environment impacts trees’ functions. Tree ecophysiology is also the focus of her research. She often works with federal agencies and private companies, for instance, to determine how various site factors are influencing tree growth.

Samuelson, who in 1999 co-authored the handbook Guide and Key to Alabama Trees, says she’ll next try to interest the publisher of her latest work in expanding the book to include New England, adding another 30 trees and making the book a guide to forest trees for the entire eastern U.S.

Forest Trees: A Guide to the Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic Regions of the United States is available in college bookstores and online through amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.

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News from:

Office of Ag Communications & Marketing

Auburn University College of Agriculture
Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station
3 Comer Hall, Auburn University
Auburn, AL 36849
334-844-4877 (PHONE) 334-844-5892 (FAX)

Contact Jamie Creamer, 334-844-2783 or jcreamer@auburn.edu
Contact Lisa Samuelson, 334-844-1040 or samuelj@auburn.edu