Plant Science Group Technical Talk: Dr Rosemary Purdie, 'Getting to know an area’s flora'.

Herbarium specimens are often a key record of the plants present in any given area. Nunzio Knerr’s December talk to the Plant Science Group graphically illustrated how the number of herbarium specimens being collected each year across Australia is markedly decreasing. Is this because we now have ‘sufficient’ knowledge about most areas, so no more specimens are needed? Is there any value in continuing to collect plants from areas that are well known, or should the collecting focus be on areas where knowledge of the flora is, by comparison, poor? If we want to get to know the flora of an area in detail, what’s required and how many specimens are ‘enough’? 

In this talk Rosemary will tease out these issues using two case studies — Black Mountain, Canberra, and the southern Simpson Desert, South Australia.

Dr Rosemary Purdie is an Honorary Associate at the Australian National Herbarium, Canberra. Rosemary has worked in many roles including Commissioner for the Environment for the ACT Government; Director Natural Resource Evaluation and Communication in the Office of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission; and Deputy Executive Director at the Australian Heritage Commission. Rosemary trained as a plant ecologist, and has been involved in helping to describe Australia's biodiversity for many years through land system surveys, vegetation surveys, extensive botanical collecting and helped with editing several volumes of the Flora of Australia.

Venue: Theatrette at the ANBG