Discovering New Plant Species in the Field—and in the Herbarium, Part One
Posted in New Plant Discoveries on December 4, 2014 by Douglas Daly
Douglas C. Daly, Ph.D., is the Director of the Institute of Systematic Botany and the B. A. Krukoff Curator of Amazonian Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Among his research activities, he is a specialist in the Burseraceae (frankincense and myrrh) family of plants.
Plant scientists discover and publish about 1,850 new species each year worldwide. That pace has not changed much since 1970, meaning that, although we have already described about 350,000 plant species, we still have a steep “learning curve” and a very long way to go before we come close to documenting all the world’s species of plants.
In this series of posts, I’ll describe some of the challenges that plant taxonomists face in their quest to discover new species. I’ll also explain why that work is so important in the effort to conserve plant life on Earth, using two recent examples from my own work in the genus Dacryodes, a group of about 60 related species of tropical trees.