Field Guide to the Trees of Southern Thailand

This handbook for the identification of the Trees of Southern Thailand will prove an invaluable tool for foresters and botanists working in the region.

Anacardiaceae fruits from Southern Thailand. Photo: Simon Gardner.

Southern Thailand includes the area south of the Isthmus of Kra to the border with Malaysia, and is the meeting point of the Thai and Malesian Floras. This project will prepare a Field Guide to the Trees of Southern Thailand. The guide will describe approximately 1,000 of the estimated 2,500 tree species from the region and will illustrate approximately 500 of these with line drawings and high quality photographs.

The project has undertaken an extensive collecting programme in Southern Thailand with two sets of specimens sent to the Bangkok Forest Herbarium and RBG Kew. The project was supported by a grant from the UK Darwin initiative. Specimens have been identified by specialists as well as project members in the partner institutions. In addition, specimen databases have been generated from the collecting programme as well as from historical collections. Specimens were sent to partner institutions at the beginning of 2004 and identification is now nearly complete. The flora of Southern Thailand has been found to be very rich and the collecting programme has been very successful in discovering several new species from the region as well as finding many new records for Thailand of species previously only known from Peninsular Malaysia. Volume 1 of the guide will be published in November 2011, work is ongoing to complete the remaining volumes.

The guide will fill a taxonomic need in Thailand and the surrounding regions and will complement the successful Field Guide to the Trees of Northern Thailand published in 2000, now in its third print run, and used by botanists throughout SE Asia. Botanical and conservation training was conducted with partners during the project with two identification courses being hosted by the Bangkok Forest Herbarium. The guide, to be published in Thai and English, will be useful for conservation, ecological, horticultural and ethnobotanical research in the region as well as for educational purposes and ecotourism.