Crossosoma 34(2), Fall-Winter 2008 
42 
EDITORIAL: A PLEA TO PROFESSIONALS 
Historically, careers in botany were limited largely to academics and agricultural 
or pharmaceutical applications. Many other people practiced (and continue to 
practice) botany as an avocation rather than a career. In the United States, and 
especially in southern California, certain botanical subdisciplines offer a relatively 
new career path to botanists: documenting site-specific floras as baseline data 
for environmental impact analyses. This profession requires special expertise in 
floristics and ecological relationships. Like any profession, it requires a sound 
background and adherence to professional standards. 
Yet professional botanists increasingly seem willing to rely on unverified online 
photographs to make the plant determinations that comprise their floristic 
projects. I recently reviewed a short botanical survey report in which the 
author cited CalFlora as a source for identifications, and reported Streptanthns 
bernardinus (CNPS List 4) on a project site. The report included a photograph of 
Caulanthus major (a locally common plant with no special status), mis-labeled 
as S. bernardinus. I looked up S. bernardinus on CalFlora and found a similar 
mislabeled photo. I believe that the report’s author is unfamiliar with the local 
flora, did not make the effort to properly identify plants on the project site, and 
relied instead on unverified photographs. 
Plant identifications are made by careful reference to the floristic literature and often 
by side-by-side comparison of vouchers with herbarium specimens. In southern 
California, we are fortunate to have several first-rate technical identification 
manuals; a variety of illustrated field guides; university libraries holding a body of 
published literature dating back hundreds of years; numerous publicly-accessible 
herbaria housing specimens identified and annotated by specialists; and access to 
leading plant systematists, by phone, mail, or email, or in person. 
All of these sources have limitations. Keys contain errors or ambiguities; field 
guides are incomplete and provide only first- guesses at plant identifications; 
monographs may be out of date or difficult to find; herbarium specimens may be 
misidentified or may not represent the phenological state or geographic form of 
a given sample; experts may be unresponsive. As professionals, we must do our 
best to use these resources in any combination needed to identify our specimens. 
When the identity of a specimen may affect land use decisions, we must be 
tenacious in tracking down data needed for an accurate determination. 
Illustrated field guides are the weakest of the resources listed above. They avoid 
technical detail and rely instead on superficial picture-matching and flower color. 
