Plant Family Recognition

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About Plant Family Recognition

A good botanist can travel to a remote part of the world, find a completely unfamiliar plant, and place that plant in the appropriate family on the basis of a few visual characteristics. That's a crucial skill, but it's a hard thing to teach and it's not an easy thing for students to practice.

The University of California at Davis has built an interactive, javascripted web quiz that shows pictures of plants and asks users to type in the correct family. The quiz covers about 100 of the most common and easily recognized vascular plant families. We developed this quiz for our own classes, but we expect it to be a valuable web-based resource for students of botany from around the globe.

If you have a photo that really captures the essence of a particular family, we invite you to post it here for inclusion in our quiz. Photos can be of flowers, fruits, seeds, leaves, or anything else that gives a strong key for identification. Photos posted to this group will only be used for the web quiz project and will be attributed to you by your Flickr ID (unless you specify otherwise). Please include an identification of the plant (at least to the genus level) in either the photo title or description.

If you have any questions about the plant photos or the quiz project, you can post a discussion topic here or send a note to the group administrator. Thanks for your help!

http://www.plantsciences.ucdavis.edu/courses/plb102/quiz/quiz_by_family.html