I am a “plant type” with no formal training in botany but plenty of field experience in my “patch,” which is southeast Arizona (USA) and northwest Sonora, Mexico. After publishing numerous journal articles and regional floras and co-authoring a couple of books, I do call myself a botanist. When I’m away from my patch, I might describe myself as a “regional botanist” or “self-taught botanist,” because my botanical knowledge is relatively narrow and doesn’t always help me with new plant families or communities, but I’m not sure how different that experience is from other disciplines and specialties.
I think people who look at plants but aren’t paid for that call themselves botanists because, at least in English, there isn’t a single word that means amateur or unpaid botanist. There is no equivalent to birder or herper that I can think of. Shall we start the trend of using “planter” or “chlorophyllist” (which leaves out the parasites) or “florist” (wait, that already has a different meaning)? I could argue that every paid botanist I know is considerably underpaid for the amount of knowledge they possess and how much unpaid time they put into their work, so maybe all of us, amateur or professional, are simply botanists.
Let’s not start calling ourselves planters, please! It’s historical meaning is too disturbing to reuse the word for something else.
A planter is what I plant IN, not a person (but I know it has a different meaning elsewhere)
It has both meanings here - we do call a large flower pot or small raised bed a planter. Only people called planters brings up the historical connotation.
I only know it as a peanut brand and a type of wart. lol
The problem with Lepidoptera is that if we do the -er version of what we’re into, we become mothers, which is very confusing to type.
Or lepers!
While I appreciate the lighthearted tone this thread has taken, I want to revisit one aspect of the original post, in light of @allygater004’s newness. Ally, I followed the link in your forum profile and then tried searching iNaturalist for “allygater” etc. to find your iNaturalist profile but I could not , so I am unsure how recently you found iNaturalist and how much time you have had to look around / read.
You said:
and
which I guess means you have seen people’s iNaturalist profiles referring to their specific interests using the term botanist but seemingly lacking formal training (or at least not mentioning it)?
I want to reassure you, in case you have had or witnessed different treatment elsewhere that
is really not the tone here. We have quite young people here and quite novice people here and people from all over the world, so education and assisting each other is the community norm, not unkindness.
Nor should people’s profile bios be perceived as pretension or ego, but rather as indicators of interest and experience. Some people use them to convey to others what they are “good for” in terms of identifications, others use them almost like personal logs, others still leave them completely blank and yet seem to be known to those “in the know”.
I hope as you feel more comfortable on iNaturalist you might fill out your own profile (wherever it is) with your own interests / experiences, and I want to reassure you that you do not need provide a CV for your interests or credential yourself for any terms you choose to apply to yourself.
As Adam succinctly put it,
Once you begin participating, even if you make a mistake (everyone does), you should not be met with derision here – or elsewhere, really. But here, especially. This isn’t that kind of place.
Again, welcome.
But the wart has two As - plantAr
Get around the confusion by adding a hyphen moth-er. You can say it differently.
I suspect this is the main driver. “Botanist” rolls off the tongue much more easily than “ornithologist” and “herpetologist”. It also can’t really be turned into something more hobbyish, at least in English, like “herper”. And “planter” is already a word with multiple definitions. I’ll sometimes refer to looking for plants as “botanizing”. Maybe “botanizer” could work as a descriptor of a hobbyist?
I really think that this is like 99% of the explanation.
Birders and herpers have another term to use.
There is no equivalent term for people who are interested in plants. We can talk about why there is no equivalent term, but that’s secondary to the original question, which was effectively: Why don’t people who are interested in plants use some term other than the professional one?
The answer is because there isn’t some term other than the professional one.
Honestly, if a naturalist lacking a formal degree in botany can ID a high percentage of the thousands of plants in their region, understands the terminology in a botanical key, and knows when they encounter an unusual species that warrants documentation … they’re a botanist.
And I’m not.
The undergraduate program I completed changed the name of the degree from botany to plant biology cerca 2010 because they thought it “sounded more modern.”
I’ve heard of this happening elsewhere as well (including a school that I worked at that changed their name at least a decade ago). Maybe the use of “botanist” has become less formal and so is falling out favor as a professional degree?
On the other hand, “Zoology” degrees/program and the use of the term “zoologist” are also falling out of favor as well.
Related but different note that there’s this thread from last year which covers some similar ground to this:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/the-rise-of-labeling-ourselves-birders-herpers-and-beyond/62751
Ditto for people who study bugs.
Honestly I think it’s just that the college was full of premed students majoring in “biology” and the botany department wanted to attract more of them. They didn’t change the name of the department btw. You got your degree in plant biology from the department of botany.
I like botanizer. Although some might think it’s related to fertilizer.
Hm. In German I would use the German equivalents like Botaniker and Ornithologe with or in many cases without adding something like Amateur. Therefore I think depending on the mother tongue it might be a translation issue.
I’ve run into this with someone claiming to be a herpetologist. After a few minutes of chatting, it was quite obvious, the woman didn’t know squat. I consider myself a “hobby herpetologist (or other field)” and do not claim any further. Some people just want to present themselves as more than they are (and hope no one notices the lie).
I wonder if this also relates to the different style and attitude that naturalists have now vs. what they had in the 1800s or early 1900s. I have a handful of old books which are basically naturalists documenting their neighbourhood bird observations for posterity in a semi-academic format (similar to many sections of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac). Nowadays the equivalent is submitting eBird lists and iNat observations, which doesn’t feel as academic (and typically birders aren’t making detailed notes on birds that don’t trip the rarity filters, or making conclusions from their observation data).
The formal club for birders in Ontario is called the “Ontario Field Ornithologists”. Its membership is certainly dominated by birders over academic researchers, although the club does maintain a journal and other functions that create somewhat of an academic atmosphere. If you look at the equivalents for some countries (e.g. Birdlife International’s partner list), a number have the format “National Ornithological Society”. But I feel like being a naturalist has become more casual and informal than it would have been when these clubs were created, and it’s less popular to be in clubs like that now as opposed to more informal associations like group chats and iNaturalist projects (the Toronto Ornithological Club used to maintain a journal as well but doesn’t any more).