Selected Plants of Northern California and Adjacent Nevada - 2 CD set

Studies from the Herbarium, California State University, Chico is a non-profit endeavor through which professional and amateur botanists study and document the rich flora of Butte County and northern California. Studies from the Herbarium emphasizes floras and ecological studies involving the plants and plant communities of northern California.

This double CD-ROM set is the complement to the book of the same name and we will let the introductory materials in that book stand as the explanation about Vern Oswald and the importance of the book to northern California botany. These CDs contain all of the text of that book in “.html” format; the treatment of each family is a separate, searchable, file. Most important about these CDs is that Vern added photographs and scanned images of most of the taxa contained in the text. These photographs include field images of the plants and often also their habitats. The scanned images include details from herbarium specimens (for those situations where Vern had not found the plants in the field after starting work on the CD) and/or fresh plant parts still showing their complete three-dimensional shape, often enlarged to several times their true size to better show diagnostic features. This use of a scanner with fresh plant materials was a truly novel approach and adds tremendously to this work.

A quick perusal of the monocots treated in these CDs shows that of the 673 taxa treated (625 with detailed information and 48 represented only in the keys), 621 have photographs and/or scanned images—that's 92% of the taxa represented!

Various versions of these disks were distributed from time to time by Vern to friends and colleagues. This CD set is produced from “07 January 2002 Version” and is the last version distributed by Vern Oswald before his untimely death on February 11, 2002.

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