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Preface

Mallorca and the other Balearic Islands rank among the most popular holiday destinations within Europe. While most travel guides mention the beauty of the vegetation on the islands, they are of little help when it comes to wanting to know the names of the plants. While such literature exists, these books are either out of print, only available in Spanish or Catalan, too time-consuming to use in the field, or simply too big and heavy to take along when going on holiday. This provided the motivation to begin to write this book. Unlike other plant identification books available today, it should

• be small and low in weight for easy transport,

• use no more that ten steps to identify most plants,

• contain more than 1,400 species that can be found on the islands,

• include photographs of many of the plants found on the islands,

• use colloquial terms wherever possible to allow users without specialist knowledge to use the book.

For this purpose, I have developed a novel, multidimensional key. This is based on 4 characteristics with 256 theoretically possible combinations. It enables users to identify the page within the book where an unknown wildflower species can be identified without even opening the book! On that page, the plants can then be determined with only a few additional steps. When using the book on a smartphone, tablet or PC, hyperlinks allow users to jump directly to the quoted page number without tedious scrolling, as in conventional nature guides.

The selection of the species has been based on the works by Beckett (1988, 1993) and Gil and Llorens (1993). While many trees and shrubs could be included, grasses and ferns had to be omitted for space reasons.

I hope you will enjoy using this book and I will be grateful for any suggestions and corrections that will help me improve the content of this book.

Essen, March 28, 2021

Horst Mehlhorn quickflora@t-online.de