This is quite frustrating.  I cannot remember the technical names for the study of certain types of lands.  These are:

Plains
Islands
Swamps
Mountains
Forests

If anyone could help me out, that would be appreciated.
Thank you for your time.

Some help:

The general term for the study of landforms and shapes is topography.

Plains: Campester is Latin for plain
Islands: Insula is Latin for island
Swamps: Palus is Latin for swamp
Mountains: Orography
Forests: Silvi-something-or-other

Thank you very much.  That helped immensely.

Forests - Silviculture

[quote author=uncronopio link=board=what;num=1043042559;start=0#3 date=01/20/03 at 16:42:24]Forests - Silviculture

Does that make Luis a Silvil Engineer?   :D

The title is Forest Engineer but I would rather prefer Silvil, it sounds so much better  

Well, I’m glad you’re being civil about it.   :D

Silviculture is ‘the care and cultivation of forests; forestry.’

We’re still looking for a word that describes the study of forests, as orography describes the study of mountains.

Some people use the word Silvics as a catch all term, but I would say that the study of forests is rather fragmented and we have Forest Ecology, Forest Genetics, Forest Pedology, and so on. Silviculture is more the study of cultivation of forests but it might be closer to the original question, I’m not sure.

On a whim, I went to the online Greek dictionary.  Assuming "-logy" means "study of" (as in "biology" [s]b[/s]from bios life and logos study of) we could coin "dentrology" from "dentro," arbor, tree.  

Silviculture is derived entirely from Latin, but silvology is half Latin half Greek.

Actually, there is a discipline called dendrology but refers to the study of individual trees (there is also dendrochronology, studying rings and relating them to environmental effects, e.g. fires).

PS A link for dendrology.

I couldn’t find a word for "forest" in the online Greek dictionary, so I had to settle for "tree."  I suppose the plural of tree is forest, but I don’t know how to form a plural in Greek.  Maybe the ancient Greeks couldn’t see the forest for the trees?  

Oh, right. And the plural of car is traffic jam, the plural of cow is barn, and the plural of check is overdraft.

Seriously, it looks like we do need a word for the study of forests. If no-one beats me to it, I’ll research the subject a bit more over the weekend. (Too busy now scribbling for a living.)

And BTW, there’s nothing wrong with combining a Latin prefix with a Greek suffix: Orography is precisely such a construction.

Shouldn’t the Greek/Latin combo be silvography?

And perhaps the complicating factor is that there are so many different types of forests…?

Hmmm… upon further investigation, it appears that Virginia Tech, at least, simply calls it Forest Biology.

AHA!  EUREKA!

From Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, Complete Reference Edition (1972):

silvics (sil’ viks) n. pl. [with sing. v.] [font=arial]SILV(A) + -ICS[/font]] the study of forests and their ecololgy including the application of soil science, botany, zoology, etc. to forestry.

Somedays it pays to check an actual hardcopy book.  

"Be bold: go for the old!"

Yay, Stargzer! And there is a plethora of infromation online…  :D