33 FROM TREES TO DESCRIPTIONS AND IDENTIFICATION TOOLS Barry J. Conn National Herbarium of New South Wales Kipiro Q. Damas Papua New Guinea National Herbarium There are very few resources available to the timber industry that will enable the accurate identification of major tree species within Papua New Guinea. The unnecessary destruction of rare and otherwise valuable tree species has, in part, resulted from the inability to distinguish these species from the preferred timber species. Furthermore, the mixture of unwanted timber with that from preferred species has frequently resulted in the downgrading of all lumber to wood-chip or round logs. The Guide to Trees of Papua New Guinea project ('PNGtrees') (Conn & Damas, 2006) is a long-term, multi-authored endeavour, with the main collaborators operating from different countries. This project is developing descriptions and interactive identification tools for the common trees of Papua New Guinea so that government and non- government agencies (particularly, foresters, loggers and environmental managers) are able to distinguish readily the important timber species from other non-timber trees. More than 400 tree species have been included in the first edition of PNGtrees. Field observations and measurements—such as plant habit, bark and leaf features—are digitally captured and managed by a Microsoft Access® database that outputs the data in Descriptive Language for Taxonomy (DELTA) descriptive data format (Dallwitz, 2005). The descriptions are automatically generated and the interactive key is produced from DeltaAccess software (Hagedorn, 2005). New or revised information can also be added from remote sites, via a web interface to the PNGtrees descriptive database. Distribution maps for each species are produced directly from the PNGplants Collection's KE Texpress database (Anonymous, 2006).