From Plant Press, Vol. 3, No. 4, October 2000.
Answers to the fundamental research questions at the heart of modern plant systematics have direct applications to understanding and even solving some of the most critical environmental crises of today’s world. What are the Earth’s species? How are they related to each other and how are they distributed geographically? How have species evolved? And how can we best translate the tree of life into a useful and predictive classification of taxa? Never before have the results of natural history science been more applicable to the needs of society than in the first decades of the new century. Since the 1800’s the great natural history museums and botanical gardens of the world have sent explorers around the globe on scientific missions to discover and document the wonders of the biological world. Sometimes these scientific voyages of discovery also had direct economic benefits, as exemplified in the spice wars and the horticultural obsession of the Victorian Age when plant products of great monetary value, such as orchids, were brought back to Europe from Asia and South America. Today the results of our taxonomic research are more in demand for practical applications to society and economies than ever before. For example, not a week goes by without some reference in national newspapers and magazines to the economics and politics of biodiversity prospecting.
Systematics can be broadly defined as the study of the origin, evolution, diversity, and distribution of life on the planet. It includes not only investigations of the evolutionary processes that have led to the origin of this diversity, but also the explicit description of biotic diversity itself. If we have no understanding of the biological entities that make up our present day ecosystems (be they species, genera, families or higher order clades), we cannot hope to understand how they interact with each other nor how they interact and respond to the environment. In today’s world of radical habitat change and environmental degradation, unless we know what are the species that inhabit particular ecosystems we have no hope to successfully manage them in a thoughtful and effective manner.
It has been pointed out that museums are a unique, and perhaps threatened, research environment themselves. With their extensive and outstanding holdings of biological collections, clearly they are the best venue for investigating and describing the diversity of life. Curiously universities have begun to divest their biological collections and programs in systematics just when the value of these activities is once again on the rise. The responsibility, therefore, falls on the world’s museums and botanical gardens to vigorously pursue taxonomic activities in order to provide the data necessary for managing the earth’s environments. The current explosive rise of bioinformatics will finally allow biological data on the distribution and diversity of organisms resulting from the study of museum collections to be used in effective ways for monitoring environmental change and identifying centers of biotic diversity. As a result governments as well as NGOs, who are dependent on these data, will be able to make responsible decisions with a new confidence on the conservation of species and habitats.
Plant systematists are ready and willing to make available the results of their scientific studies for the purpose of understanding and conserving the environment. Although they may not choose to engage in the management activities themselves, they are committed and dedicated to preserving the entities they study. Systematists at natural history museums and botanical gardens should be recognized and appreciated for their efforts to address today’s societal challenges as well as their contributions to the basic scientific knowledge about living things. More than ever our research has become fundamental to the conservation of life on the planet.
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