Field Tropical Dendrology course. Tropical tree family identification. COSTA RICA

The Tropical Dendrology course is devoted mainly to teach predetermination techniques i.e. to prepare students to define at a glance, just in the field the most probable genera and/or family to which a tropical plant belongs. It is accepted that after having the family, it is easier to get the genus and, from here to get the species. Students obtain the species name of most of the trees and shrubs found during the course. The also know how to find genera and species names in the literature or in the herbaria, when working in their own countries. This system is devoted mainly to the American tropics but, according to participants from Africa and Asia, it will work also in their countries, where species are different but families and genera are mostly the same as in tropical America.

In this course we apply a highly efficent methodology to identify trees, shrubs and other plants just in the field, developed by Dr. L. R. Holdridge and expanded upon by Dr. Alwin H. Gentry, that has been successfully applied in Central and South America. Such method has been followed for years in some Latin American universities to teach courses taken an average of 3-4 hours every week and giving the normal quizzes and exams. This way university students have enough time to study and organize their class notes and to prepare home works.

Some years ago we started giving short intensive courses. We used to work an average of 8 hours every day, causing that the students do not have enough time to study their class notes as they use to do it during university courses. For this reason, our first short intensive courses normally lasted NO MORE than 3 days. Why?. Because longer courses did cause “students memory to be overstuffed with non-digested data”.

. What to do?. We introduced to the course innovative practical teaching techniques to avoid students be overstuffed. A device successfully helping students to learn plant pre-identification is the “the DENDRO-MATRIX, a 5-page summary of all important families and genera studied during the course, designed and taught by the main instructor. As in university courses, in our short courses we use field characteristics such as leaves, twigs, bark, buttresses, odors, exudates, etc. We also provide information about scientific names, about main uses of species we study, and about general relationships between plants, animals and environment. It is notorious that participants learn more than it is normally expected in a two-week intensive dendrology course. In addition, participants are trained to progress by their own, after the course, using the DENDRO-MATRIX in identifing more and more species of tropical trees and shrubs just in the field. By the end of our course, most of the students have declared that they are able to identify, down to family level, about 80% of the tropical trees and shrubs of the Neotropics.