Plants are essential for many aspects of our daily lives as they provide food, medicines, and construction materials. Plants also affect us negatively through pollen and resulting allergies, poisonous species in gardens and pastures and as adulterants in herbal medicines, and as invasive aliens in marine, freshwater and terrestrial environments. Understanding and valorising botanical biodiversity requires accurate, modern and rapid assessment approaches. Plant diversity worldwide is under threat from destruction of natural habitats due to human population growth related consequences as well as climate change impacts on sensitive ecosystems. It is in our capacity to study, map and describe this diversity, and plant systematics and taxonomy has suffered from a loss of research and institutional funds as research has become more competitive and taxonomy was considered too descriptive to compete with emerging fundamental research. In taxonomy, a point has been reached where more and more taxonomists are working from retirement, and knowledge is lost when experts retire without transmitting their experience-gained knowledge to a younger generation. Natural History Museums and Botanic Gardens risk becoming barren repositories of past diversity and associated knowledge.
