Duck and Fletcher Map

The Editor's Preface to The Game Types of Oklahoma

Bruce Hoagland

The Game Types of Oklahoma and A Game Type Map of Oklahoma, prepared by L. G. Duck and Jack B. Fletcher, was an early effort to describe and map the natural vegetation of the state (see also Bruner 1931, Blair and Hubbell 1938). The continued use of A Game Type Map of Oklahoma as a potential natural vegetation map by educators and state agencies marks the success of their effort. By providing descriptions of the Oklahoma landscape immediately following the "dust bowl" era of the 1930's, these works are of historical interest. Information provided in The Game Types of Oklahoma was not restricted to vegetation and game animals. Duck and Fletcher included information regarding land use characteristics, agricultural practices and demographics.

Originally, the two documents were published separately. The Game Types of Oklahoma appeared in a longer report, A Survey of Game and Furbearing Animals in Oklahoma (1943), published by the Oklahoma Game and Fish Commission's (now the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation) Division of Wildlife Restoration and Research. The vegetation descriptions provided in The Game Types of Oklahoma elaborate the A Game Map of Oklahoma map units. These works of Duck and Fletcher are brought together on this Worldwide Web Site for two reasons; (1) access: existing copies of The Game Types of Oklahomaare difficult to acquire (copies of the report can be found at only a few libraries in Oklahoma) and (2) to acquaint a broader audience with Duck and Fletcher and the vegetation of Oklahoma.

In preparing this document, I minimized editorial changes to preserve the authors' voice. I updated plant synonymy and provided scientific binomials for all plants originally listed only by common name. The following references used were: Waterfall 1979, Taylor and Taylor 1991, Kartesz 1994. Additional information on the vegetation of Oklahoma can be found in Johnson and Milby 1989 and Hoagland 2000.

Plates were scanned from a copy of the original manuscript because the original plates cannot be found. Therefore, the quality of some of the plates are not as good as we would like. However, we have included all of the plates because we consider them an important part of the document. We are hoping that better quality scans will become available.

Bruce W. Hoagland
Oklahoma Natural Heritage Inventory and
Assistant Professor of Geography
University of Oklahoma
Norman
E-mail: bhoagland@ou.edu

Literature Cited:

Blair, W. F., and T. H. Hubbell. 1938. The biotic districts of Oklahoma. American Midland Naturalist 20: 425-454.

Bruner, W. E. 1931. The vegetation of Oklahoma. Ecological Monographs 1: 100-188.

Hoagland, B.W. 2000. The vegetation of Oklahoma: a classification of landscape mapping and conservation planning. Southwestern Naturalist 45: 385-420.

Johnson, F. L. and T. H. Milby. 1989. Oklahoma botanical literature. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, USA.

Kartesz, J. T. 1994. A synonymized checklist of the vascular flora of the United States, Canada, and Greenland, volume 1 - checklist. Timber Press. Portland, Oregon.

Taylor, J. R. And C. E. S. Taylor. 1991. An annotated list of the ferns, fern allies, gymnosperms, and flowering plants of Oklahoma. Biology Department Herbarium. Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Durant.

Waterfall, U. T. 1979. Keys to the flora of Oklahoma. Oklahoma State University. Stillwater.

Acknowledgements: I would like to express my appreciation to Ms. Pam Pogorelc for typing and secreterial assistance and to Dr. Forrest Johnson for html formatting of this document.

Please Cite as:

Duck, L. G., and J. B. Fletcher. 1945. A survey of the game and furbearing animals of Oklahoma; Chapter 2, The Game Types of Oklahoma. Oklahoma Game and Fish Commission, Division of Wildlife Restoration and Research. Oklahoma City.