George Bowes, Botany
A Note From the Chair
This article was originally printed in the March 2000 issue of CLASnotes.
George Bowes
As in other departments, Botany is facing a 30% turnover as senior faculty retire. This represents a substantial loss of experience, but it also provides an opportunity to project a new vision for the future. Two areas ripe for enhancement are tropical ecology/systematics and plant molecular studies. The University of Florida and the department have substantial strengths in both, with individuals whose academic programs can rightly be described as international in scope and reputation. However, botany in our department is not just an academic exercise, it also addresses real-world concerns and controversies, as the accompanying article by one of our plant ecologists, Jack Putz, demonstrates. Thus we have faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students investigating topics such as tropical forests and their conservation, the response of crop and native species to global climate change, plant biodiversity, and the detrimental effects of invasive plants on natural ecosystems.
To give an example closer to home, the US, and particularly Florida, is experiencing costly problems with ornamental plants that escape and threaten native ecosystems such as lakes, Paynes Prairie and the Everglades. Kaoru Kitajima is collaborating in research on Ardisia crenata, a plant that is invading hardwood hammocks and state parks. Even closer to home, Walter Judd has documented a startling loss of biodiversity on our own campus during the recent building-boom. All departments, and especially Botany, need more space, so new construction is positive. Unfortunately, many native plants—rare and even federally endangered—have in ignorance been destroyed, and replaced by Home Depot-type ornamentals. Other significant plant populations on campus are in imminent danger. With a little forethought this situation could easily be avoided.
Three Botany faculty are in UF's Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Program, and here, too, controversy cannot be avoided. Fear, largely based on misinformation and poor science, has been whipped up in Europe over GM (genetically modified) foods, and is impacting us. A safe food supply is of paramount importance, and environmental impacts must be minimized. But the fact is, humans have been genetically modifying plants for thousands of years, but using less precise techniques. As a result, most of the plants we use as food are very different from their wild ancestors, and far from "natural." Critics in more affluent nations often overlook the potential advantages to developing countries of, for example, GM-rice with increased vitamin A that could reduce blindness, and enriched cereals that could lessen protein-deficiency disease.
Thus, Botany faculty are no strangers to problems facing our campus, nation and world; in fact we thrive on them, which, unfortunately, is more than can be said for some plant species. For more on what the Botany Department and faculty are up to, visit us at our home page <web.botany.ufl.edu>.
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George Bowes
