Review of my Woody Plants software

The first review of the program Woody Plants of the Southeastern United States: A Field Botany Course on CD has appeared in the Plant Science Bulletin. The full text of the review is below. I will post a link to the online version as soon the Botanical Society of America's website is repaired.

Woody Plants of the Southeastern U.S.: A Field
Botany Course on CD. Kirchoff, Bruce. 2008. ISBN
13:978-1-930723-62-7. (CD US$27.00) Missouri
Botanical Garden Press, P.O. Box 299, St. Louis,
Missouri 63166-0299

Woody Plants of the Southeastern United States: A
Field Botany Course on CD provides a wonderful
tool for teaching and learning taxonomy in general
as well as the specific flora mentioned in the title.
Formatted for Windows machines, the program is
quite simple. After registering, the user selects one
of four options: building a list from the available
families, genera, or species; studying the items on
the list; taking a quiz; and taking a test. Study can be
with or without prompts and can be either advanced
slide-by-slide by the user or automatically advanced
by the program. The quizzes are shorter than the
tests and have the display of text prompts as an
option, while tests do not.

While the CD is aimed at the Southeastern US, the
families represented include many of broader
distribution which might make this CD-ROM of
interest to a wider audience in the US, Canada, and
possibly elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.
There are 55 families represented, many with
multiple genera, and each species shown has at
least four high quality photographs available, most
species with more. Some even have over a dozen
photographs of various taxonomically-useful
features.

It would be nice if this CD-ROM also came in Mac
and Linux formats, but given the capacities of the
newer Intel-based Macs and of various Linux tricks,
that may not be an insurmountable impediment to
users of those operating systems. Buy a copy today
for your introductory class to use in practicing
taxonomic features and the quick identification of
common woody plants.

-Douglas Darnowski, Department of Biology, Indiana
University Southeast