In 2009, botanist Naomi Fraga was hunting an unnamed flower near Carson City, Nev. Ms. Fraga saw the plant disappear in real time as its desert valley habitat was bulldozed to make way for Walmarts and housing. But to seek legal protection for it, he had to give it a name.
The tiny yellow flower became the Carson Valley Monkeyflower, or, formally, Erythranthe carsonensis, allowing conservationists to petition the US Fish and Wildlife Service to protect it under the Endangered Species Act. If their application is approved, the flower will go from unknown to extremely important in less than a generation, at least as far as Western science is concerned.
Taxonomy, the science of naming and classifying organisms, is the foundation for the conservation of extinct plants and animals. Yet the field—often seen as an archaic, dusty tradition harkening back to intrepid 19th-century botanists describing the plants of newly colonized lands—is dying. Several decades after the taxonomic frenzy of the 1830s to 1920s, when Western scientists delved deep into far-flung regions of the world, molecular genetics revolutionized our ability to classify species and began vacuuming while the analogous field of taxonomy was left to languishing.
With genetic sequences, we can now identify the fundamental building blocks of life, but we need to be able to interpret the genetic data in a way that humans can understand and use. This is the job of classification. And if we want to save what’s left of the vast diversity of life on Earth, we’ll have to reinvest in this science. How we delineate between species determines what we choose to save.
The dire state of taxonomy in the United States is best illustrated by Flora of North America, the definitive 30-volume effort to name and describe every plant species here and in Canada. The project began in the 1980s, but is still unfinished because its contributors have struggled to secure consistent funding. Until the final volume is completed in 2026, it should be revised immediately. For example, his first volume, on ferns, published in 1993, is completely out of date as new species have been discovered and non-native species have moved in. Imagine trying to make sense of a 2024 Camry with a manual from 1993. That’s what botanists and conservationists are trying to preserve the biodiversity they work with.
The flora of North America has fallen victim to a broad shift in our scientific priorities as a nation. The National Science Foundation is the major funder of American botany. But since the 1980s and 1990s, its funding has increasingly gone to hypothesis-driven, laboratory-based research. When Flora contributors ask university botanists to work on the project, it often has to be done pro bono.
Much of the work of taxonomy is done in botanicas, collections of dried plant specimens that serve as a library and are usually housed in universities and botanical gardens. In fact, many of the species that remain to be discovered are probably already hiding in herbariums as anonymous specimens. But even nurseries are now losing funding. Duke University recently backed its collection, one of the largest in the country, saying it was too expensive to maintain.
I see this and other elements of the slow death of classification as a tragedy. I’m in a graduate program in botany at the University of Vermont, and the act of naming a plant has always felt like a kind of intimacy between species. Although my university’s herbarium is still well funded, I feel that the basic work of plant identification has been left behind as grant money and students flow into more exciting fields of biology. Fewer and fewer plant biology students know how to identify the plants in their forest.
The consequences of allowing the taxonomy to flounder are significant. Each year, botanists around the world discover about 2,000 new plants, a number that has remained fairly constant since 1995, suggesting that there are still tens of thousands of plants to introduce to science. Three quarters of new species are already threatened with extinction. If we don’t have taxonomists to describe these species, we have little chance of saving them — or their habitat.
And governments and conservation groups are more likely to act when exciting species are discovered. In the mid-1990s, for example, after botanist John Clark and his colleagues discovered a number of rare species in western Ecuador, the government created an ecological reserve half the size of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In 1992, botanists discovered and named eight plants just outside of Birmingham, Ala. The area is now protected by the Nature Conservancy.
Sorting could also save lives and influence what we eat. There are an estimated 8.7 million species of plants and animals. We only described 1.2 million of them. Which ones that have yet to be named have undiscovered therapeutic or other properties that could change the course of medicine or nutrition?
With the threats of climate change, nuclear war and artificial intelligence looming, the act of simply recording our plants can seem trivial. But when I asked Art Gilman, a botanist, taxonomist and author of “The New Flora of Vermont,” why it matters, he paused in the cautious manner of a scientist. He didn’t give any answers about curing cancer or revolutionizing food systems. “We’re missing the opportunity to get to know our world,” he finally said.
