Fueling botanical recording in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales

The Botanical Society's Recorder’s Conference is over for 2013, but this is not an end, just a pit stop in the collection of botanical data. Now that the field season draws to a close, this event is an opportunity for the botanists of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales to share knowledge, argue about policies, meet friends and make new ones.
At this year’s conference, some of the presentations were the taxonomy of Dactylorhiza and Orchis; on escaped alien ferns; on willows and poplars; on rare plants of Somerset; on the flora of Tristan da Cunha and on errors in botanical recording.

Britain and Ireland’s field botanists are a well-motivated, confident group whose work means that these are probably the best surveyed countries in the world and they do this largely out of their own pockets.

Now that I am botanically recharged I am confident in the continued progress the Botanical Society is making towards the study of the north-western European flora. We have many challenges ahead of us . We need to look forward to the next atlas of the flora; to the challenges of conservation; to monitoring change and to recruiting and training the next generation of field botanists. However, it is obvious at the conference that we have the people who can do the job and the enthusiasm to fuel it.

This work by Quentin Groom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.