AP, Fox News, etc: World’s plant names compiled, Linnaean style. Handy tool, or surprising discovery of scant diversity?
Over the centuries botanists have found tons of plants and named them. Sometimes one plant gets named several times – and now after major labor a collaboration by the UK’s Kew Gardens and US’s Missouri Botanical Garden has made a master list that includes all it can find and it selects which among various synonyms ought to be the primary name. The overall list has 1.25 million scientific, or Linnaean names. Of those about 300,000 are categorized as verified distinct species, 480,000 are now lumped in with the first group as synonyms, and about 260,000 names are yet to be resolved.
That means if a researcher is looking for literature on, say, the serpentine hardiness of the California golden poppy Eschscholzia californica, he or she could search under all ten, slight variants on the name (usually the third terms, for subspecies) so as to raise chance of getting pertinent references.
The Associated Press‘s Raphael G. Satter writes it from London as a boon to conservation, trade, and medicine – and solution to a problem wrought by the confounding multiplicity of oft-redundant names in assorted reference works. Solid job, nothing highly remarkable, a few nice style flourishes.
And then there’s Fox News. It’s always notable to see a news agency tackling a story and deciding on the angle itself rather than slavishly following a press release’s guide. Of course, one needs to do so with care. This one has no byline, so one doesn’t know on whom to pin it, but what an angle. It’s plain enough in the headline: World’s Plant Life Far Less Diverse Than Previously Thought. Original angle indeed. It says this lack of diversity is surprising. It says botanists and scientists hail the project “for many different reasons” and implies they are overlooking the absence of diversity discovery as the real news. It has no citation of authority or quote to back up its assertion that the cleaned-up list of names is shorter than botanists expected, that the world has fewer plant species than has been thought, or that anybody is surprised by the general results. If you’re going to go lone ranger on a news story, following a different trail, you ought to include some evidence of evidence. Fox calls its approach to news fair and balanced. That’s led some at other news agencies, jealous no doubt of Fox’s domination of 24-hour cable new, to retort that Fox is unfair and unbalanced. You decide.
Other stories:
- Daily Mail (UK) Clarie Bates: Botanical A-Z via Kew: British experts complete database of every plant name on the planet – all 1.25 miillion of them:
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch – Georgina Gustin : Missouri Botanical Garden seeks to name the world’s plants ;
- St. Louis Beacon (newish, nonprofit outlet) Jo Seltzer: One list for all the world’s plants ; Long piece.
- The Australian – Ben Webster: Plant list weeks out mass naming duplications;
- AFP: New botanic database holds a million plant names ;
Grist for the Mill:
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Press Release ; Missouri Botanical Garden Press Release ; The Plant List ;
- Charlie Petit
