Book Review 35
Review
Title: World Economic Plants: A Standard Reference
ISBN 13: 9781439821428
Published: 2013
Pages: 1300
Cost: $149.95
Rating (1-5): 5
Submitted By: Blade, Stanford F.
Date posted: August 02, 2013
An exhaustive reference of the world's economic plants.
This is a superb reference guide that will assist in understanding what plant your colleagues are discussing no matter how obscure the reference. This book will explain the scientific identifification of some weirdly-named plants such as beefnut, cowpea or woollybutt. The book will enlighten you on the distribution of starbur and the economic uses of bitterleaf.
The second edition of World Economic Plants – A Standard Reference (John H. Wiersma and Blanca León) is a remarkable compilation of 12,235 vascular plants (the first edition covered 9,500 species) which addresses scientific nomenclature, synonymy, common names, economic importance and geographical distribution. The careful rigor evident in the preparation of the first edition is once again obvious-with 180+ individuals listed as reviewers of the material.
The obvious benefit of this book is the standardization of plant names. The value of scientific exchange is based on being able to identify the species under discussion. This reference not only provides scientific names for Latin-script common names, but also includes indices in Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean and Russian. The format of the information provided is consistent and logical within entries. The description of economic importance is not extensive, but covers a wide array of elements including (but not limited to): food, materials/wood, fodder/forage, weeds, medicines (including folklore), ornamentals, poisons, social uses (smoking materials, stimulants) and bee plants.
The title description of this work as “a standard reference” is not an idle boast. This is a book which botanists, agriculturalists, geographers and biologists will find of great value. The authors have done a great service to bring together such a large amount of information in a comprehensive and useful publication. The authors posthumously dedicate the book to Edward McKinley Bird who pioneered work on the Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN). Authors Wiersma and León acknowledge that “without the tremendous effort that McKinley invested in developing software that enabled us to extract and format data directly from GRIN, we could never have published the earlier edition of this work”.