Travels in China for Botanical Field Work
11:00 a.m., Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2007
Webster Hall Auditorium
Admission: free

If you wonder what botanists actually do when they go off on field trips to the world’s wild places, this lecture will attempt to explain. Nick Turland will describe traveling into remote rural regions of China in order to collect plant specimens for scientific study. Not only should this give a picture of botanical field work in general, but it will introduce you to China and its amazingly diverse flora of 31,000 seed plant species. Professor Turland will describe the day-to-day life of working in the field, focusing on trips that he has made, describing team members, language issues, transportation, equipment, locating suitable areas of habitat, methods of collecting and preserving plant specimens, food (very diverse in rural China), accommodation, and some of the hazards.

Nick Turland is an associate curator in the research division of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. He joined the staff there in 1997 to work on the Flora of China Project, moving from his native England where he had worked in the Botany Department of the Natural History Museum, London. Professor Turland is now co-director of the Flora of China Project, which is coordinated from St. Louis and involves 11 institutions in China, the United States, and Europe. He has traveled to China five times for fieldwork, workshops, and Flora of China editorial meetings, and is due to go there again in August 2007. Professor Turland is also a specialist in botanical nomenclature — the international rules for the scientific naming of plants — and is actively involved in the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, which is revised at the International Botanical Congresses held every six years. Since 1984, Professor. Turland has also had a deep interest in the flora of Greece, especially the South Aegean island of Crete, and has published several books and articles on that region.