A Visual Guide puts in value the knowledge about the flora of Lanzarote
This Monday the ‘Visual Guide of the Vascular Flora of the Lanzarote Biosphere Reserve’ was presented. Ten years of fieldwork, exhaustive data collection and documentary and photographic material, have yielded a work of more than 600 pages, 234 descriptive and illustrated sheets and an extensive photographic work of 825 images, of great value for the knowledge of flora of Lanzarote.
This great variety of plants and their uses was known by those shepherds who walked by the island with their cattle, by the agriculturists who cultivated the sands, the topsails, the nateros, the jable … and by investigators and naturalists who crossed the paths and the island’s natural and agricultural spaces.
The authors, Jaime Gil (Agricultural Technical Engineer from the University of La Laguna) and Marta Peña (Agronomist from the University of La Laguna) are technicians with extensive knowledge of the flora of the Canary Islands and researchers of the plant and ethnobotanical resources of the crops and the wild flora of the islands. They have also jointly published different works related to the traditional crops of the Canary Islands (potatoes, sweet potatoes and grains) and with the cultural uses of the flora of Lanzarote.
The authors stressed that the island, despite being one of the most “arid” and “dry” of the archipelago, hosts a very large plant biodiversity. They also highlighted in the guide the rescue of vernacular names, native names of the island collected in the book, which give the guide a supplementary value to the botanical descriptions and cultural contents.
It is estimated that the publication can be purchased at the price (indicative) of 18 euros per copy. In total, some 2,500 copies of this publication have been published.
