Forest Botany and Dendrology Help & Online Tutoring

Forest botany deals with the plants themselves: how a tree is built, which characters tell species apart, how specimens are collected and preserved, and how vegetation is sampled and described.

The tree-identification half of the subject is frequently taught and examined under the name dendrology, the study of woody plants. Courses split the two differently — some run dendrology as a separate paper, others fold it into forest botany — so this page covers both, and the identification method below is the same either way.

If you want general plant science rather than trees specifically — plant kingdom, diagrams, physiology and the standard practicals — that is covered on the botany assignment help page.

It is not the same as forestry, which deals with managing the forest as a resource. If you are looking for tree volume, basal area, mean and current annual increment, rotation or silvicultural systems, those belong to forestry help and are worked through there. For taxonomy and classification in depth, see applied botany help.

What this page covers is the part students are actually examined on in the field and the practical: can you identify an unknown tree, can you justify the identification, can you prepare a specimen, and can you analyse a quadrat.

A note on what follows: the identification examples use widely recognised characters and genera as illustrations of method. Always identify against the flora or key prescribed for your own region, because the species present and the keys used differ enormously between forest types.

Almost every textbook hands you a key and leaves you to it. The method matters more than the key, because the method is what stops you going wrong at couplet one.

Work in this order:

1. Look at the whole tree first. Habit, size, crown shape, whether it is evergreen or deciduous, and where it is growing. This often narrows things to a handful of families before you touch a leaf.
2. Check leaf arrangement on the twig. Opposite, alternate or whorled. Do this before anything else about the leaf, because it is the most reliable single character and it splits the possibilities roughly in half.
3. Decide simple or compound. Find the axillary bud: it sits at the base of a whole leaf, never at the base of a leaflet. This one trick settles the question that students get wrong most often.
4. Then the leaf details. Margin, venation, apex, base, texture, hairs, smell when crushed.
5. Then bark, twig and any exudate. Latex, resin or coloured sap is diagnostic and is lost if you only look at leaves.
6. Then reproductive parts if present. Flower and fruit are the most reliable of all, which is why keys lean on them and why a specimen without them is often unidentifiable to species.
7. Only now open the key, and work it in order from the first couplet.

Sample several leaves from different parts of the tree. Shade leaves are often larger and thinner than sun leaves on the same tree, and juvenile foliage can look nothing like adult foliage. A student who keys out one unusual leaf gets a confident wrong answer.

This table is the single most useful thing on this page, and no set of notes seems to state it plainly.

The practical consequence: build your identification on the top half of this table and use the bottom half only to confirm. A student who starts from leaf size and crown shape will be wrong on a suppressed tree, a coppice shoot or a plantation-grown specimen.

A key is a series of couplets. Each couplet offers exactly two alternatives, and you must read both before choosing.

Here is a short key of the kind used in practicals:

1a. Leaves needle-like or scale-like … go to 2 1b. Leaves broad and flat … go to 3 2a. Needles borne in bundles … *Pinus* group 2b. Needles borne singly on the twig … other conifer genera 3a. Leaves opposite … go to 4 3b. Leaves alternate … go to 5 4a. Leaves compound … ash group 4b. Leaves simple … maple group 5a. Leaves compound … neem group 5b. Leaves simple … fig group

The specimen. Broad flat leaves; arranged alternately on the twig; each leaf divided into many leaflets along a central axis, with an axillary bud only at the base of the whole structure; leaflet margins toothed; no latex.

The trace. - Couplet 1: the leaves are broad and flat, not needles. → 1b, go to 3. - Couplet 3: checking the twig, leaves come off singly at alternating points, not in opposite pairs. → 3b, go to 5. - Couplet 5: the axillary bud sits at the base of the whole divided structure, not at the base of each leaflet, so this is one compound leaf, not several simple ones. → 5a, neem group.

When both halves seem to fit. This happens constantly and it is not a flaw in the key. Three rules:

1. Read the whole couplet before deciding; the two halves are written to contrast, so the second half often clarifies the first.
2. Choose the better fit rather than a perfect one, and write down the couplet number you were unsure about. If the answer looks wrong at the end, return to that couplet and take the other branch.
3. If you genuinely cannot choose, your material is usually insufficient. Go back and collect flower or fruit.

An examiner gives marks for a documented route through the key, including a backtrack. A bare species name with no working earns far less, and it cannot be checked.

The simple-versus-compound test, once more, because it carries more marks than any other single point in a practical: a leaf has an axillary bud in the angle where it meets the stem. A leaflet does not. If you can find a bud at the base of each green unit, they are separate simple leaves. If the bud is only at the base of the whole divided structure, it is one compound leaf.

A second check: leaflets of one compound leaf all lie in a single plane and fall together; separate simple leaves on a shoot do not.