What should NSF fund in ethnobotany and economic botany?
Dr. Roskoski stated in her letter that ethnobotany and economic botany are broadly interwoven throughout NSF and thus initiatives tying these areas together would be better than a cluster. Though that is true in theory, it has not actually worked in practice, especially for biologists who work in these disciplines. Anthropology funds a small amount of work with persons of live cultures but rarely more than rudimentary surveys of plant use if that. Archeobotanists fair only slightly better. A cluster in ethno and economic botany would not require erasure of these interests in other places as Roskoski warned. Any multidisciplinary science can potentially be found in more than one place and still have one or more central clusters and initiatives. For example ecology and biodiversity overlap with each other and each is interwoven with a number of clusters and initiatives. Molecular biology which has several areas of concentration and additionally seems to be in nearly every cluster in biol
