Plants, Biodiversity and Botany in Practice: A Science Friday Plant Spotlight

Overview

In this Science Friday episode, Ira Flato hosts a stage conversation with Dr. Lucia Lowman, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden, to explore how plants shape daily life, science, and medicine. The discussion centers on vast plant collections, digitization efforts, and the significance of plant biodiversity globally.

Key Insights

• The garden maintains millions of plant specimens across herbarium collections, seed banks, and living collections with advanced digital databases.
• Only a fraction of plant species are used as medicines, underscoring the enormous potential for new discoveries.
• Amazon biodiversity is astonishing due to geography and rivers driving speciation, with trees contributing to atmospheric processes through evapotranspiration.
• Botany offers cross‑disciplinary value and could benefit every sector from finance to architecture through ecological insight and biomimicry.

Overview

The Science Friday episode recorded at the Sheldon Theatre in St. Louis features Ira Flato in conversation with Dr. Lucia Lowman, the World Ecology Award winner and leader of the Missouri Botanical Garden. The discussion centers on the global reach of plants in daily life, science, and medicine, and it offers a behind‑the‑scenes look at how one of the world’s largest plant collections is organized, studied, and shared with the public.

Missouri Botanical Garden: Collections and Data

Lowman outlines the scale of the garden's holdings: a herbarium with about 8 million dried plant specimens, a seed bank around 1,500 species that store seeds, and some 55,000 living collections thriving around the garden. To manage these assets, the garden uses a Living Collections Management System (LCMS) for living specimens and Tropicos for herbarium data, which is being digitized. The team has digitized roughly 2 million specimens previously and recently completed 1.5 million more, bringing the digitization progress close to half of the herbarium collection. Online access to digitized material is available, enabling researchers and the public to explore plant specimens remotely.

In terms of provenance and curation, Lowman explains that living collections come from three broad sources: a third collected in the wild, a third acquired through exchanges with other botanical gardens, and the final third sourced from local owners and nurseries. This approach emphasizes that collections are not merely about expanding species counts but about assembling ecologically interacting communities that reflect real ecosystem dynamics.

Global Plant Diversity and Knowledge Gaps

Beyond the garden, the discussion addresses the sheer scale of plant biodiversity. Approximately 400,000 described plant species exist, with about 350,000 of those being flowering plants and roughly 50,000 non‑flowering groups including conifers, bryophytes, ferns, and other vascular plants. Despite this vast catalog, Lowman emphasizes that much of plant diversity remains undescribed or poorly characterized. Even among described species, good information on geography, genetics, and morphology is available for only about 15% of species, highlighting how much is yet to be learned about plant biology and ecology.

Lowman recounts decades of Amazonian fieldwork, often traveling by boat or helicopter to collect as many species as possible. On every trip, she returns with new species, underscoring the Amazon as a hotbed of discovery and the ongoing importance of field biology in a modern digital world.

Amazon Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

The Amazon is discussed not as a simple oxygen source but as a complex ecological engine. The forest’s trees emit significant amounts of water vapor through evapotranspiration, effectively contributing to global climate regulation—an idea the guest characterizes as the Amazon acting as the Earth’s air conditioning. The trees release enormous volumes of water daily, creating what Lowman and others have called flying rivers that influence regional and global climate patterns. The Amazon’s exceptional biodiversity is attributed to factors such as vast geographic area, tropical climate that avoided glacial extremes, and the river network that repeatedly isolates populations and fosters speciation.

Five factors are distilled to explain the origin of high species diversity: expansive land area, a relatively stable tropical climate that did not experience ice ages in the same way as temperate zones, high rates of species interactions, the role of rivers in creating barriers and micro‑habitats, and ongoing processes that generate new species over time.

Medicinal Plants and Drug Discovery

Lowman notes that historically plants have been a major source of medicines, with one in four drugs or drug ingredients derived from plants. However, fewer than 1% of plant species are actively used in medicines today, leaving a vast reservoir of unexplored biodiversity with potential pharmacological value. The garden’s work—naming species, mapping distributions, understanding morphologies, and cataloging ecological relationships—contributes to this immense potential by building a robust knowledge base of plant biology that could inform future drug discovery and development.

The discussion also touches on the broader implications of plant science for human welfare, including the importance of plant materials for sustainable design and biomimicry in architecture and engineering. Lowman also relates botany to business, suggesting that botanists could have critical roles in varied sectors such as biodiversity finance and sustainable materials development, reflecting the field’s broad relevance beyond traditional laboratories.

Botany as a Career and Mindset

The guest offers practical advice about pursuing botany, describing botany as the most fun field and highlighting curiosity as the essential trait for success. She describes how botanists can approach the world with plants as friends, discovering everyday ecology in ordinary surroundings. She argues for a botanist in every business context to help address topics such as carbon and biodiversity credits, sustainability in architecture, and the search for plant-inspired design solutions that could transform multiple industries.

In closing, the conversation emphasizes the need for accessible, credible science about plants and invites listeners to engage with Missouri Botanical Garden resources and the broader plant science community.

Closing Thoughts and Takeaways

Across the episode, the central threads are clear: plants are deeply embedded in daily life, science, medicine, and industry; large and well‑curated plant collections enable discovery and preservation; deep knowledge of biodiversity is essential for sustainable futures; and curiosity can drive cross‑disciplinary innovation in business and design as well as in science.