Even with my duties as Curator of Botany at the Nova Scotia Museum, I am still amazed at the huge number of plant species existing in this tiny province. Do you know we have 1640 different plant species in Nova Scotia? I’m on a first-name basis with just about all of them, and I know where they live. That’s the botanist in me.
The conservationist in me says something else. People have a way of affecting plant species in a big way. For example, about a third of all the plant species found in Nova Scotia were brought here by people from other places in the world over the centuries of settlement A third of all of our plant species are rare or at risk because of the activities of people and development of the land. Nova Scotia is in danger of losing these plant species forever.
That’s why I do what I do. To me, our natural history is one of the biggest reasons people have chosen our province as a place to bring their families for the last 500 years. It’s a reason Nova Scotia was a home to ancestors of the Mi’kmaq almost 10,500 years before that. We and the people before us were and are completely tied to Nova Scotia’s unusual climate and geography, a natural habitat the like of which exists nowhere else in Canada.
That’s why it is so important to understand more about ways to conserve the plants found here.
As Curator of Botany, my work involves documenting and caring for the Nova Scotia’s Museum collection of plant specimens. For more than 150 years, the plant life of the province has been carefully recorded, studied, and preserved by curators at the museum so that researchers today and tomorrow can understand what existed in the past, what exists here now, and explore ways to preserve their existence for tomorrow.
The study of botany is....organic. It never ends, and lives and grows like the plant life I study. The museum constantly adds new information to the precious provincial collection, and wherever possible supports researchers in their quest to know all there is to know about plant life in Nova Scotia.
The result is a plant archive gathered over a very long time. It is accessible to the researchers, scientists, educators, and others who use them for study and understanding toward conservation of all of the plant species found here.
To conserve Nova Scotia’s plant heritage, I work on many projects with other conservationists within government and from private sector. I’ve also helped develop strategies to protect particular species under threat. The Eastern Mountain-avens (Geum peckii) and the Thread-leaved Sundew (Drosera filiformis). are “Red-listed” vascular species found nowhere else in Canada, but southwestern Nova Scotia. Low population numbers and size, plus proposed industry have increased the risk of extinction to these species.
From 1988 until 1996 I reviewed and revised the1969 publication The Flora of Nova Scotia (Roland and Smith). The resulting publication was titled Roland’s Flora of Nova Scotia, revised by Marian Zinck. In 2006, I started production of an ebook on Nova Scotia plants, with my friends and mentors, Ruth Newell and Nick Hill. It is nearly 7 years later and we hope to publish in 2014.
To me, conservation of Nova Scotia’s precious plant population depends on having great information to work with, such as the documents and collection at the Nova Scotia Museum. It depends on continuing to add to that important body of knowledge through ongoing collections and research. And it depends on professionals and non-professionals alike taking time to appreciate, study, and work together to find solutions that will protect Nova Scotia’s diverse plant species for future generations.
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