Why We Need More Field Botanists

I attended the NM Rare Plants Technical Council meeting today.  This was the first with the new director and was held in the Botanic Garden's Atrium.  About 60 attended, much to my surprise. 

One message that I came away with is the obvious:  Without conserving plants, there can be no animal conservation.  Habitats begin with plants and water.  

Another take-away was that by protecting rare plants, we protect entire habitats and the more common plants in them.  

Yet another obvious point is that you can't conserve what you don't know you have.  Plant and wildlife inventories, monitoring threatened species, and maintaining shared information sources are required. 

Which gets me to my conclusion, we need more field botanists.  There just aren't enough of us to do all the work that needs to be done.  The 60 of us in the room today were a huge majority of the working botanists in the state.  USFS has empty slots for many of its botanists for district forests in NM and AZ.  We need decent funding for these positions and then an educational pipeline.  Young students need to learn about botany, get energized about the plant world, and find a path towards a university or technical degree.  Outreach into rural and indigenous communities needs to broaden.  

Only then can we do the hard work that climate change will demand of us.  Only then can we repair our broken world.