• Plant Resource Pools
• a) Use of plant keys for identification. b) Plant collecting for voucher specimens.
• Processing and mounting plant specimens.
• Underutilised food plants - Sourcing appropriate botanical information.
• a) Two important plant families. b) Writing a plant profile.
• a) Food plants. b) Medicinal plants.
• Student Plant reports.
• Student Plant reports.
• Ethnopharmacology.
• Material culture – basket making.

Students are assessed on this module through two 3000 word plant profiles and 10 herbarium voucher specimens. During the module students are required to give two 15 minute presentations concerning useful plants of their choice, feedback is given to the students after which they are required to submit full plant profiles including all relevant botanical and cultural information and conservation status of the chosen plant. Students are also required to collect and process 10 plants into herbarium voucher specimens. Feedback is given to students for both these elements of coursework. Through this feedback students will be informed of their strengths and weaknesses in sourcing, understanding and presenting Ethnobotanical information.

• The reading list is updated each year with additional texts as appropriate, however core texts remain: Basic: Rose, Francis: 1981. The Wildflower Key: a guide to plant identification in the field of the British Isles and NW Europe. London: Frederick Warne and Co. Heywood, V.H. 1993. Flowering Plants of the World. New York: Oxford University Press Harris, J.G. & Harris, M.W. 2001. Plant Identification Terminology. An Illustrated Glossary. Spring Lake Publishing. Systematics: Judd, W.S., C.S. Campbell, E.A. Kellogg and P.F. Stevens. 1999. Plant Systematics: a Phylogenetic Approach. Sunderland: Sinauer Associates. Cronquist, Arthur. 1988: The Evolution and Classification of Flowering Plants, Second Ed. Bronx, New York: The New York Botanical Garden. Stace, C. 1997. New Flora of the British Isles, Second Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zomlefer, W. 1994. Guide to Flowering Plant Families. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Iniversity of North Carolina Press. Herbarium Techniques Bridson, D. and L. Forman (eds.) 1998 The herbarium handbook. Kew: Royal Botanic Gardens. Economic Botany: Simpson, B.B. and M.C. Ogorzaly. 2001. Economic Botany: Plants in our World, Third Edition. Boston: McGraw Hill. Lewington, Anna. 1990. Plants for People. London: Natural History Museum Publications Cook, Frances E. M. 1995 Economic botany data collection standard, Kew : Royal Botanic Gardens.

See the library reading list for this module

• This module will: • enable students to identify and collect a variety of plant material and process them into herbarium voucher specimens. • enable students to source, critically evaluate, synthesise and present botanical, anthropological and other pertinent ethnobotanical information regarding particular plant species. • enable students to identify plants that belong to two of the major plant families of Ethnobotanical interest • familiarise students with a variety of plants and their characteristics, which belong to of the ‘functional groups’.

No prerequisites other than acceptance into the MSc in Ethnobotany or MSc in Ethnobotany or, for students taking it from other postgraduate courses in the university, permission from the instructors and from the programme’s director. For the MSc Ethnobotany the co-requisites are SE802, SE831, SE832, SE837, SE840, and SE839.