From Conversation website
For hundreds of years, botanists have collected plants to describe species and keep in herbaria across the world. But while physical plant specimens are irreplaceable, photographs of plants are also an invaluable resource for botanical research, conservation and education.
Photographs of plants capture information that can be lost from dead, dried plants, such as flower colour. They also provide ecological context and form the cornerstone of many field guides and education resources.
All plant species known to science have samples preserved in at least one herbarium. Under the scientific rules for naming species, a species is not recognised unless there is at least one specimen officially stored in a collection somewhere in the world.
Unfortunately, and perhaps surprisingly, many plants have never been photographed in the field. Just 53% of the 125,000 known plant species in the Americas have field photographs in major online databases.
Given almost 40% of the world’s plant species are threatened with extinction, there’s a strong impetus to photograph as many of these as possible before they disappear forever. Without photographs of these species in the field, many could go extinct without us even realising.
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