Botanist

Imagine standing in a bright, sunny glade on a warm summer afternoon. You have been hiking around this park enjoying the sunshine for hours now, and if the weather holds, you will be doing this again tomorrow and the day after that. While you've been enjoying the sunshine and fresh air, you have also kept a close eye on the plants around you, diligently recording what you see.  

You are a botanist and you have been sent here to begin recording data on plant species that will be included in a report on environmentally sensitive areas.  

The data you record will become a baseline for species richness that can be used to measure the health of these sensitive areas in the future. 

As a botanist, you are used to doing baseline surveys for newly recognized environmentally sensitive areas. You know how important your work will be to long-term protection.  

You start by recording all plant species present in the area, which is your measure of species richness. You use your field classification guide to identify each species based on taxonomic characteristics. This is probably the hardest part of the job because there can be hundreds of different kinds of plants in a single area.  

For each kind of plant, you also take note of its relative abundance and distribution. You look at how many plants there are of each species and where they are in relation to one another.  

This survey and species map will demonstrate what the environmentally sensitive area looks like now so that future conservation efforts can be directed to keeping the area that way.