| National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Trees of North America | 
 enlarge | List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $9.56
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 2 reviews)
Sales Rank: 55361
Category: Book
Author: Bruce Kershner
Publisher: Sterling
Studio: Sterling
Manufacturer: Sterling
Label: Sterling
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 4.5 x 1.6
ISBN: 1402738757
Dewey Decimal Number: 582.16097
EAN: 9781402738753
ASIN: 1402738757
Publication Date: May 9, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
From the National Wildlife Federation comes the most up-to-date, all-photographic field guide to North American trees. The Jeffrey Pine, Coconut Palm, Staghorn Sumac, and Western Hemlock: this single, portable volume features these, plus more than 700 other tree species and varieties, with special emphasis on their leaves, bark, fruits, and flowers. More than 2,000 stunning images show these trees in their natural habitats. Other features include: a unique identification tip for each tree; range maps showing distribution in North America; How to Identify a Tree section; a detailed glossary of tree parts and leaf, fruit, flower, and bark types; essays on ecology, conservation, and North America?s important forest types; plus a complex species and quick-flip indexes. The guide?s unique waterproof cover makes it especially valuable for use in the field.
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| Customer Reviews:
 VERY complete & well-organized for a compact guide September 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is more a concise small-format encylopedia of North American trees than a field guide. It's amazingly comprehensive, containing information on native species and a lot of cultivated imports. For a single taxon, photographs of leaves (on a white background, for clarity), bark, flowers, and fruit, along with the text, are arranged on a single page so there's no jumping around. Line art is used only to help define terms or help navigating the keys. The text contains a major identification tip to look for in each species.
As a field guide I think the identification keys are its weakest point. They start, as all lay-oriented keys, with leaf arrangement and shape, and then quickly move to flower and fruit characters. For most of the year you don't have flowers and fruits, so I wish the keys concentrated more on leaf details (margins, venation, size). Experienced enthusiasts will spend more time in the index than the keys; the inexperienced will probably spend a lot of time paging through, looking at the excellent pictures, for a pattern match. Because the guide is so comprehensive, though, there are a LOT of pictures to page through. It's printed on thick, durable paper, though this makes it rather big and heavy for the pocket.
An ideal combination might by this guide paired with May T. Watts' "Tree Finder: A Manual for the Identification of Trees by Their Leaves," only $4.00 from Amazon & truly vest pocket-sized. It has excellent keys for the layperson who lives east of the Rockies.
The Amazon price for the NWF guide makes it a steal. You won't find this much information about trees in one small volume anywhere else.
I give it 5 stars for the information & 4 as an identification guide.
 Best tree book I have seen! August 31, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I have had and looked at dozens of ID books, and they all have ups and downs.This, as far as I can tell, has little to no downs. It has a wonderful layout with pictures and text together...no more flipping back and forth! It also is organized so that you can search by leaf type. Even if you don't know how to tell the difference...the info on how to tell the different leaf patterns is all at the front of the book.
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