What are the big questions in plant systematics? - a report of a symposium on the future of global plant systematics

An interesting article in the last issue of American Journal of Botany. See especially the section discussing the big questions in plant systematics, and how we can address them. Thanks to David Cantrill for bringing this paper to our attention.

From the introduction to the paper:

"Forty botanists from 13 countries met this March in Amsterdam at a special colloquium at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences to discuss the future of plant systematics (“Beyond the Tree of Life: the Future of Plant Systematics”; Fig. 1). The meeting was funded by the Netherlands Royal Academy and organized by Erik Smets (Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, Netherlands) and colleagues*; it addressed several paradoxes in our field. First, with an ongoing planetary-scale biodiversity crisis, the need for plant systematists has never been greater, and yet taxonomic expertise appears to be in steady decline, as noted by repeated calls for action (e.g., de Carvalho et al., 2007Drew, 2011). Despite this, new plant species are continuously being discovered, and plant systematics as a field has survived and even thrived, thanks to the common overarching goal of building and understanding the Tree of Life, spurred by the availability of new technology and powerful analytical frameworks. Yet, members of the public and colleagues outside biology often express surprise when new plant species are discovered or appear unaware that the Tree of Life is far from being fully resolved. In this context, how do we justify the importance of continued research on plant biodiversity and explain its importance to the general public, university administrators, funding agencies, and policy makers?"

Among other things, the colloquium asked the question "What are the cool, achievable questions in plants sytsematics, and how can we answer them?". Here's their answer:

"The third discussion session aimed at formulating questions and solutions that plant systematists as a community may realistically target in the near future. Four tentative key questions emerged: (1) How is plant life related, and how is diversity distributed in time and space? (2) What are the processes generating biodiversity? (3) How many species are there, and what do we know about them? (4) How do we break the barriers for training and employing systematists in the developing world? To address these questions, we thought that a flagship international project aimed at collecting/synthesizing in public databases, the phenotype, interactome, and genome from 100 specimens each of 1000 species over their distribution range and ecological gradients could attract excitement and major sources of funding and provide significant, novel answers and new questions."

This paper is useful and interesting food for thought for our own Decadal Plan process. The fill paper is at http://www.amjbot.org/content/103/12/2022.full