Schools changing the names “botany” and “zoology” to some form of “life science” or “biology” because
It might help with grant optimization as well. It might be easier to get funding if it looks like your department could be developing new pills or medical procedures, compared to studying a rare plant or insect.
i’ve never heard anyone call themselves a botanist, even if they studied something plant-related in school and work in a plant-related field.
My state has a State Botanist (actual title) who focuses on rare and endangered plants. I think she’s also on iNat. I’ve not seen anyone working professionally on plants shy away from being called a botanist.
do they actually introduce themselves as botanists in a professional setting though? if you were to call them professional botanists, do you think they would correct you? for the folks i know, my impression is that “botanist” would feel either too generalized (if they specialized in a particular taxon or a particular field) or too limited (if they worked with more than just plants, even if the extra stuff was a minor part of what they did).
besides having an actual title like “State Botanist” that was probably conceived many decades ago, “botanist” just seems like not a great description of a lot of professional work these days, but i don’t know anything.
“State Botanist”, or other governmental type positions, is actually one of the contexts in which I hear the term “botanist” used the most. There’s probably some sampling bias here as I work for a state government. But these type of jobs which involve expertise in some regional flora, identification, cataloguing, surveys, and generally tracking plant biodiversity best fit my informal, personal perception of what a botanist is.
I think this is probably downstream of the late 20th-century shift in science towards activities that would generate highly generalizable principles: traditional botany and zoology were seen as acts of cataloging, lower-order thinking and held somewhat in contempt. e.g., Rutherford, “all science is either physics or stamp collecting” or Medawar’s characterization of palaeontology as “a comparatively humble and unexacting kind of science”. Departments re-inventing themselves as “Plant Science” rather than “Botany” probably allowed them to include people (and equipment, and funding…) that would not always have fit well with a more traditional botany department, like plant molecular biologists, plant microbiologists, etc.
I think the undesirable implications of “botany” (as a label for an academic department) are not so much the association with amateurs so much as the suggestion that it emphasizes traditional and outdated aspects of plant science.
I’d say self-description as a botanist is pretty normal for my region (eastern US). Sometimes it’s in the job title, sometimes the official title might be “Field Ecologist” or something like that, but the latter, if they largely approach it from the lens of vegetative communities, would probably describe themselves as “botanists” or “field botanists”.
From that thread:
From another thread:
Recently I met another iNatter in real life, and I was talking rather animatedly about which wildflowers were currently blooming, and how much identifying of plants I do on iNat. They asked me “Are you a botanist?” to which I replied “No, I’ve just loved wildflowers my whole life.”
I would love to have replied “Yes!” but I feel that Botanist is a term for those formally educated or employed in the field - although I could have legitimately replied “just an amateur one.”
“Botanizer” and “botanizing” are lovely terms, but are not in common usage in the US. They conjure up, in my mind, earlier centuries and other places. But I suspect that many folks would scratch their heads and ask “you’re a what-er? you do what-ing?”
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Naturalist speaks to me of earlier times. And yet. Here we are on I naturalist.
When I refer to myself as a botanist in Czech, I always use “amatérský botanik”, an amateur botanist. Without this qualification, I would understand botanik to refer to professionals or at least people who studied botany in a university. This amateur botanist collocation appears to be pretty common and quite acceptable for anyone to use (I am at least a member of the local branch of the botanical society).
From reading all the above, it seems there is great geographical variation in acceptability in calling yourself a botanist. In Britain you wouldn’t be considered pretentious or egotistical for saying you were a botanist or an ornithologist, provided that you actually are one. Maybe that is because there is such a long tradition of amateur natural history study here, and so few professionals. I would estimate the ratio of amateur botanists : professionals is at least 100 : 1. I reckon there is less justification in calling yourself an ornithologist if all you do is watch birds for fun. But if you are one of the 1000s of bird-watchers who take part in the many BTO studies which rely on amateurs to collect most of the data, ornithologist is justified.
I see much of the reason being that the field has a very long tradition of being held together by people who contribute substantially to botany without being career botanists. Botany is a humblingly broad field with far too few practitioners for what it covers, and the field is so expansive relative to its participants that subdividing it can feel arbitrary. Oftentimes we use the term “botanist” to just mean “I know plants” and you’re not expected to pull much else from the label.
In any case, professional titles specifically relating to plants are uncommon, and most of the time someone who studies plants is forced to take on the unhelpful labels of environmental scientist, ecologist, or wetland delineator. My professional title is ecologist, but if I introduce myself by that label I do not convey the degree of my specialization into botany.
Without delving too deep into the undervaluedness of botany as a field, the systemic erosion of botany by academia has resulted in a strange community that thrives only when separated from the institutions that should be raising its successors. Botany is dying, and it is being killed. See The End of Botany by Crisci et al. and “The Botany Bill” (an actual bill proposed to U.S. congress to try to keep the field from dying).
As is the assistant state botanist @mdpurdy 
Who needs botany ? Who needs a herbarium ? Rather use the funding and the space for sport.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/duke-herbarium-closure/48997
I feel naturalist is a term people don’t associate with any profession unlike a botanist, mycologist, etc. So I have ended adopting it over the last years to explain to others why someone, who doesn’t do it for work, would spend so much time and resources learning about living beings for… the sake of it.
At first, I used nature enthusiast and similar terms but it’s far too vague in the approach. (Almost) All my friends are nature enthusiast, I think, but wanting to learn about wasps or sponges in their habitats and “study” them… that’s why adding a tag can help them understand.
I suspect non-professional identifying themselves as botanist might be referring to the same thing.
What’s the ROI of an herbarium anyways?
Such a waste of people’s time…
[Goes without saying, it’s ironic]
Yikes! Do you have a similar opinion of museums? What about libraries?
