Background

The protocol for plant material dissociation was described by Franklin (1945) for wood; botanical anatomists have adapted the method for leaf epidermal dissociation. Dissociation methods allow the visualization of the epidermal cells as well as their attachments in a clearer way than diaphanization and epidermal imprints methods. In addition to the dissociation method described herein, there are others using Jeffrey’s solution (1:1 solution of chromic acid and nitric acid, each at 10%) or only nitric acid (Johansen, 1940), but these methods use strong acids and more hazardous to human health and the environment. Moreover, in our experience, epidermal dissociation with Franklin solution is more effective for a greater number of species.

As leaf epidermal traits have a great taxonomic value, texture analysis from epidermal images can be a suitable method for plant identification, once texture analysis is a powerful technique that allows the extraction of measurements from patterns in the images. In the study realized by (da Silva et al., 2016), three different methods were used in the process of texture feature extraction from leaf epidermal images: Fourier descriptors, corrosion-inspired texture analysis and local binary patterns; among them, Fourier descriptors were the best option, achieving higher success rate in plant species identification. A brief description of the methods for epidermal dissociation and texture feature extraction from microscopic epidermal images using Fourier descriptors has been reported in (da Silva et al., 2016).