In her 41-year career, Missouri Botanical Garden Scientist Charlotte Taylor has described 500 new species of plants. That makes her the most prolific female author of new plant species alive. She is the third most prolific female botanist to describe new species in history.
But until a team of researchers looking to recognize the work of women in botany reached out to her, she had no idea of her ranking.
“I had never even thought about it. You look at the 19th century authors…they described new species and they’ve got 20—30 ,000 new names,” she explained. “It was a total shock. I had to read the message twice.”
The three most prolific plant describers in history. South African Botanist Harriet Margaret Louisa Bolus described 1,148 new species, Professor Olive Mary Hilliard Burtt of Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh described 522 new species, and Garden Scientist Charlotte Taylor has described 500 new species and counting.
Shining a light on female botanists
Researchers from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the University of Cambridge released “Acknowledging female role models in botanical and mycological taxonomy” in the spring of 2023 with the goal of celebrating the accomplishments of female botanists who could serve as role models for other women pursuing STEM careers, specifically in plant science.
“Many scientists, and members of the public, can name numerous famous male biologists such as Linnaeus, Darwin or Humboldt but struggle to come up with names of their female counterparts,” the paper states.
Their findings included a ranking of the most prolific female describers of new plant species. The paper’s authors wanted to highlight these women, the paper explains, because research shows that fostering a diverse community of people leads to excellence in the field.
Laura Lagomarsino, a botanist and professor of biology at Louisiana State University who was mentored by Taylor, agreed.
“Representation is incredibly important, whether in botany, science writ large, or any other discipline,” she said. “Until very recently, very few women held permanent professional positions in botany. Charlotte was not the first, but she was definitively among those who paved the path for me and many of my female colleagues at my career stage, and we aspire to be like her in our own careers.”
Women in botany
The paper looks at how the percentage of plants described by female botanists has increased over time, although slowly, as more women took on those permanent professional positions in botany. Taylor said she has seen that trend herself throughout her career.
In graduate school, for instance, all her professors were male, aside from one woman who cotaught a course with her husband. Some men were skeptical of the seriousness of the women in the program in what she calls “a transition time.” When Taylor started at the Garden, she mainly saw women working as herbarium assistants or secretaries.
“Now, we have herbarium assistants, secretaries, and a bunch of PhDs,” she said.
Throughout her career, Taylor said she felt supported by academic advisors and later by Garden management and staff. She recognizes that other women may have not had the same experiences and struggled to find support or mentors. Taylor also points to her upbringing as being instrumental in her success.
“My parents raised me to go ahead and do whatever you want,” she said. “My father said, ‘don’t let other people make decisions for you.’”
Solving mysteries
Taylor’s upbringing also helped guide toward a career studying the natural world. Her mother had a degree in natural history and her father was a wildlife biologist. Both were avid bird watchers, and her family spent much of their time outside.
Although she had an interest in plants since childhood, Taylor’s career certainly didn’t start as a quest to add her name to a list of botanists known for naming new species. In fact, describing new plant species was not among her goals at all.
“I don’t consider myself a systematist. I’m an ecologist,” she said.
To layman’s ears that may sound like splitting hairs, but the distinction is that Taylor wants to know what makes a species tick rather than a focus on classifying plants into groups. She is more intrigued by how individual species are pollinated and dispersed, and why they all live together.
“I love mysteries and I love puzzles, and plant taxonomy is a puzzle,” she said.
Trying the Tropics
The puzzle she has spent her career working on is Rubiacea, the coffee and quinine family. This is a family of flowering plants that includes thousands of species of trees, shrubs, and herbs. Rubiaceae are found in almost every region of the world, largely in tropical and subtropical climates. Taylor’s work has focused on Latin America, where the highest number of species can be found.
Again, this is a departure from her original career goals. A native of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Taylor loved cold weather and wanted to pursue a career in arctic science. She attended Duke University for graduate school specifically for its arctic ecology program. However, the Organization for Tropical Studies was also based at Duke and she was encouraged to give the tropics a try.
“I went to the Tropics and that was it. No more winter,” she said.
Her advisor, prominent Duke plant taxonomist Robert Wilbur, suggested she study a group of plants that has hundreds of tropical species, often with 10 different species in one small geographic location. And it turns out more than a quarter of the plants in Palicourea, a genus in Rubiaceae, were undescribed.
“So, in order to figure out how they all live together, I had to describe them, and I just got really into that,” she said.
Time to focus
Studying a group with so many species was a large part of the equation that led to Taylor’s large legacy describing new species. Working for the right institution was key to her success, too, Taylor said.
“The Garden has more flexibility than any other institution,” she said.
Taylor started work for the Garden in 1990. She has worked on many Garden projects over the years, mainly floras, which are lists of all plants in a certain geographic region, and plant checklists, or scientific consensus of known plants.
During most of her career, the Garden approached these as institutional projects, meaning many different scientists worked together to create the Flora or Checklist, rather than one individual doing that work, as is the case at many botanical institutions. That meant Taylor could continue to focus specifically on Rubiaceae as she contributed to floras for Mesoamerica and Nicaragua and plant checklists for Ecuador, Peru, Boliva, China, Madagascar, and other locations.
“If you want to work on exactly what you want to work on…this was the world’s best place to work,” she said. “No one else is really comparable to us.”
As Taylor slowed down field work, she had the support of fellow Garden scientists who brought back plants from all over the world as they continued work on other projects, which almost always included undescribed Rubiaceae.
“I was lucky to have the right plant group, the right institution, the right management, and the right support,” Taylor said.
Framing the future
While Taylor has described an impressive number of Rubiaceae species, many remain unnamed. She continues her work on the family but is also collaborating with younger botanists like Lagomarsino as she looks to the future of the plant family.
Lagomarsino met Taylor when she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Garden. Taylor wasn’t her advisor, but the two got to know each other.
“We had many fun conversations about botany, and Charlotte provided so much valuable advice when I transitioned to a permanent position of my own,” Lagomarsino.
After Lagomarsino was in a full-time role at LSU, where she serves as director of the Herbarium and a biology professor, Taylor invited her to collaborate on a project looking at the evolution of Palicourea, a genus in the Rubiaceae family.
Lagomarsino and her students will build on Taylor’s strong groundwork in species description by using DNA sequences to learn more about relationships between the more than 600 species of Palicourea. They will use that information answer big picture questions like, “How did this group spread throughout the American tropics in all types of ecosystems?” and “Why is the so much color diversity in flowers and fruits in Palicourea?”
Taxonomy work is a crucial foundational step in this and many other studies, including those focused on conservation and restoration. It is essential to continue this important work to support conservation efforts as many of the world’s plants face the threat of extinction.
“We do not yet have a full understanding of all species on this planet, and at the same time, we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction. Documenting and describing species— the goals of taxonomy— have never been more important than they are today,” Lagomarsino said.
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