Beautiful but deadly: Identifying plants shouldn’t be left to amateurs

Oleander is beautiful but potentially deadly. That’s why IDing plants isn’t for amateurs.

Even pros need help. Just like doctors need tools to diagnose disease, even the most experienced nursery operator will come across an unfamiliar plant from time to time. You are only as good as the science you have access to.

That’s why it’s so important to the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences — the science behind your industry — to reverse last year’s veto of funding for the Center for Landscape Conservation and Ecology (CLCE).

The veto threatens the future of projects like Dr. Chris Marble’s work on a poison plants mobile app. He’s got a team working on how to use your phone to identify which plants are toxic, how toxic, and if they’re a threat to people or to animals.

State cuts interrupt the seed funding CLCE provides for important work like Dr. Andrew Koeser’s investigation of what makes a tree survive a hurricane. He wants to know which species are the most nearly hurricane-proof in our hurricane-prone state.

He was arguably as prepared as anyone for Irma. He started loading up data on trees three years ago, and to run the experiment on how well they hold up in hurricanes, all he needed was, well, a hurricane.

Irma delivered. Now Koeser can do the before-and-after comparisons necessary to start drawing conclusions. Koeser’s discoveries could inform which species of trees the state’s nursery industry propagates and sells, which ones you plant in your yard and which ones adorn your commute.

Koeser might even help cut down the chances that a limb will cut down your power lines in future hurricanes.

In the case of identifying oleander, funding for science is arguably a matter of life and death. Even if lives weren’t at stake, livelihoods are. More than 100,000 people work in the state’s landscape and nursery growers industry. If all those people lived in one place, their community would be more populous than Davie or Boca Raton.

Many of these plant professionals will be at the Tropical Plant International Expo in at the Broward County Convention Center this week.

Whether they discuss it on the convention floor or not, members of the Florida Nursery, Growers and Landscape Association know that publicly funded science touches them all.

It also touches you. We all want plants that don’t poison our pets and trees that withstand the weather.

Because the public benefits from this science, the public helps pay for it. With 1,000 new Floridians a day, it’s not an opportune moment to scale back investments in discovery about how to keep Florida green amidst such growth.

Jack Payne is the University of Florida’s senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources and leader of the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.