Mali flora images

These images of plants, in nature or as fresh or dried specimens, were made in conjunction with research on languages of the Dogon and Bozo families, along with the isolated language Bangime, in Central Mali between 2006 and 2023. (See also the work "Dogon and Bangime flora terms from central Mali (2023)" in Deep Blue Data: https://doi.org/10.7302/34vf-jk03. The late Pierre Poilecot of CNRS (Montpellier, France) provided invaluable help in the early days. However, I am responsible for the determinations (including taxonomic updates), and I am not a professional botanist. The images range from poor to excellent technical quality. They may be of use for two purposes: a) acquiring a basic knowledge of the flora of the area, for newcomers; b) as vouchers for the determinations in my lexical spreadsheets on the various languages. While the main burst of taxonomic changes due to molecular studies has probably leveled off as of 2023, some revisions at all levels (family, genus, species) will occur over time. The African Flowering Plant Database at url https://africanplantdatabase.ch is especially useful for updates/synonymies at the species level, but tends to lag behind on revisions at the family level. You can also consult the Practical identification guide to plants of northern and east-central Mali, compiled from the literature, in Deep Blue Documents at https://dx.doi.org/10.7302/8631.

Each "work" for flowering plants in this collection has the title "Mali flora images X" where X is the name of a botanical family. Users who enter at the collection level should search by family (from Acanthacaceae to Zypɣophyllaceae). Large families Poaceae, Malvaceae, and Fabaceae are divided into two or more works, but they will all show up in search results for the family. There is one work for non-flowering plants with title "Mali aa fern fungus lichen images".

Within each work, the individual images have file names like these:

fl_Amaranthaceae_Celosia_trigyna_Beni_10_2011_fl_50035_JH.JPG
fl_Lamiaceae_Hoslundia_opposita_Barato_09_2021_piripirinaw_03_fol_fr_JH.JPG
fl_Zygophyllaceae_Tribulus_terrestris_Sevare_patch_50672_JH.tif
fl_Fabaceae_Caesalpinioideae_mimosoid_Vachellia_(or_Acacia)_nilotica fuwON_1_Barato_09_2021_entire_JH.JPG

They begin with "fl" for flora, the family, the genus, and the species epithet. For Fabaceae, the subfamily and if relevant "mimosoid" (part of subfamily Caesalpinioideae) precedes the genus. These items are separated by underlines (important to note if searching for a genus-species binomial). The remaining items were mostly for my own use. They may include a location (on which see the following paragraph), the date, a crude representation (without IPA symbols or diacritics) of a native name, a five-digit code for my use, a photo number like "2" for the same plant, "JH" to indicate that the image was taken by me or by a member of a project I directed, jpg or occasionally tif for forrmat, and an indicator of what part of the plant is shown: entire, bark, fl[ower], fol[iage], lf (leaf), fr[uit], tr[unk], br[anch], th[orn].

File names can be quite long especially for Fabaceae because of the subfamily names. In lists of files under such works, the file name may be shown in abbreviated form (with ellipsis ...) so that the genus and species terms may not be visible. The only way to find files for a particular species is by searching for that species. Alternatively, all of the files in a work can be downloaded in zip form and users can then see complete file names. The readme's for each work list the included species.

Most of the locations indicated are in the Dogon-speaking area, which includes cliffs, high plateaus, inselbergs, sandy plains, seasonal rivers, and small ponds. Dogon locations include Beni, Tupere, Ségué, Bendiely, Dianwely, Anda, Walo, and Tongo Tongo, among others. The inselbergs and adjoining plains of the montane Songhay are represented mainly by Hombori and Kikara. The Niger and Bani river zone from Mopti to Segou, a mainly Bozo-speaking area that features seasonal floodplains, is represented mainly by Djenne, Barato, and Kolongo.

Some of these plants are featured in documentary-style videos. There are two collections of such videos from Mali in Deep Blue Data:

Mali documentary videos from 2023 - https://doi.org/10.7302/4851-2c52
Central Mali documentary videos - https://doi.org/10.7302/4jg9-j095

Additional flora-related videos from Mali may be archived at a later date. Some fauna images may also be archived at a later date.

The various Mali collections (flora, videos) will be paralleled in time by comparable collections for southwestern Burkina Faso, and small collections for north-central Côte d'Ivoire, all in Deep Blue Data.

Terminology resources can be found in the collection "Native flora-fauna term spreadsheets from interior West Africa" - https://doi.org/10.7302/5a0d-gq20