Botany courses becoming an endangered species

With National Science Week coming up this month we are being asked to select favourite native flowers to celebrate. However, as Professor Darren Crayn at James Cook University in Cairns remarks, while enjoying some benefits of plant life in the moment, we are neglecting the larger field of botany – fewer courses are being taught at universities, sometimes as mere add-ons in biology courses. And yet plant life is so incredibly diverse in Australia that 150 new species are discovered every year.