What do botanists typically do?
Botanists explore the plant world just like zoologists study the animal world. There are over 250,000 species of flowering plants. Add several thousands of more species to that from other groups of plants like the gymnosperms (e.g., cone-bearing plants like the pines), ferns, club mosses, horsetails, mosses, and liverworts. You are dealing with lots of diversity of form and function. There is still so much to learn from this diversity. There are different kinds of botanists out there. For example, taxonomists put names to plants, systematists explore evolutionary relationships among plants, plant evolutionary biologists explore the process of diversification in plants, phytogeographers try to explain plant distributions in space and time, physiologists study plant function, plant biotechnologists may work on genetic engineering, phytochemists study plant chemicals, plant pathologists study plant disease, and ethnobotanists study the various roles of plants in human societies. Then ther
