Why I do this, besides for the pure pleasure:
“Everyone in our community already knows we need more people in the trenches doing this work,” says Patrick Herendeen, a senior botanist at Chicago Botanic Garden and program director, American Society of Plant Taxonomists. “There's a tremendous amount of biodiversity out there that we have yet to discover and document and describe and publish as new taxa, and overall, we seem to be training fewer new taxonomists, fewer people are coming into the field, [and] more people are retiring, and so that's pretty disturbing in terms of numbers of people available in [the] future with the expertise to do this work.”