George Yatskievych

I was born into a military family. We moved to a new place every few years, but I consider Arizona, where my parents retired, to be my home state. Although I learned an appreciation for nature early from walks in the woods with my mother, I did not develop a career interest in plant science until my sophomore year in college. However, once bitten by the botany bug, it consumed me, and soon I was working in the University of Arizona herbarium while botanizing in the mountains, deserts, and wetlands of Arizona on weekends. There is no substitute for experiencing plants in nature, and my interest in photography was, in part, an outgrowth of my field work. Early in my career, I also became passionate about the conservation of plants and the places they grow. When I am getting ready to sleep at night, I tend to read a lot, mostly science-fiction and fantasy novels.

As a botanist, I consider myself to be a generalist, rather than having a narrow focus.  My main research interests involve three interrelated focal areas: floristics, plant systematics, and plant conservation.  Additionally, my career has been closely linked to herbarium development.  Herbaria are museums of systematically arranged, preserved plant specimens that both voucher the occurrences of particular plant species at particular times and places on the earth and that provide documented materials for a wide variety of research, education, and outreach efforts.

Floristics is the study of the diversity, abundance, and distribution of plant species within a defined geographical area.  This may be as small as a county park or as large as a country or continent.  During the period from 1987 through 2015, my primary floristic focus was on the Flora of Missouri (for which we produced a massive 3-volume printed work and associated online materials), and I continue to contribute to evolving knowledge of that region’s flora.  Since moving to Texas in late 2015, I have begun discussions about projects in the central portion of the state (the Hill Country) and in other under-explored portions of the state.  Over the years I have also been involved with the Flora of North America Project, for which a huge community of botanists is collaborating to produce an encyclopedic treatment of the flora of the U.S., Canada, and Greenland in 30 volumes.  Outside of that region, I also contribute treatments to collaborative projects in various other countries, such as parts of Mexico, Central America, South America, China, and Pakistan.  Floristics is also linked to phytogeography, the study of plant distributions, and I continue to be interested in both how present distributions of plant species came to be and factors that contribute to how these distributions are changing over time.

As a botanist, I have participated in explorations to discover new plant species and to rediscover populations of poorly known plants.  However, describing plant diversity is only half of the job of the plant systematist.  The other part involves formulating hypotheses of taxonomic relationships among plant species and groups.  These investigations involve accumulating data from a variety of sources, including macro- and micro-morphology, chromosome numbers, DNA sequences, etc., in order to evaluate potentially shared, derived characters useful in creating phylogenetic classifications.  The field of plant systematics has increasingly become focused on laboratory-based inquiry, but my research has retained a strong component of field- and collections-based investigations.  I have specialized mainly in certain groups of ferns and parasitic flowering plants.  Early in my career, I became fascinated with plants that do not conform to preconceived notions of “normal” plants.  Thus my taxonomic research has tended to involve plant groups that have unusual adaptations, such as ferns growing in dry environments, as well as angiosperms that have lost the capacity to photosynthesize and instead draw food and water directly through connections to host plants.  These projects often involve collaborations with other botanists, as these plant groups frequently have extensive geographic ranges.

As a field-oriented biologist, it is impossible not to become aware of plant endangerment.  Plant populations documented by historical herbarium specimens become increasingly difficult to relocate in the field, productive sites for botanical exploration disappear between field trips, and many plants once common in an area decline in abundance.  Anthropogenic disturbances, disruptions of natural phenomena such as fire- and flood-cycles, and rapid climate change have acted to put an estimated 25% or more of the U.S. flora at risk, and similar levels of endangerment have been proposed for many other regions.  My research interest is mainly at the level of individual plant species.  In examining the details of a given plant’s life history, can we determine what factors are likely to have the greatest influence on the species’ decline? Thus, I work with pollination biologists, ecologists, and population geneticists to try to piece together the factors that limit a species’ ability to meet its ecological and reproductive potential.  Understanding the factors that are most important in causing a species to decline helps other conservation biologists and land managers to design strategies attempting to stabilize or recover populations of that species.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

• 2016–present — Research Associate, Botanical Research Institute of Texas
• 2015–present — Curator, Plant Resources Center, University of Texas at Austin
• 2015–present — Research Associate, Missouri Botanical Garden
• 2002–2011 — Research Associate, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum
• 2001–2015 — Research Associate Professor (adjunct), Dept. of Biology, University of Missouri–St. Louis
• 1987–2015 — Curator, Missouri Botanical Garden
• 1987–2005 — Botanist and Resource Scientist, Missouri Dept. of Conservation