Evidence-based conservation depends on the quality of its data; and the quality of millions of botanical records created annually is assured through verifiers. These volunteer experts review and give feedback at an immense, growing scale. As more people embrace botany, verifiers deserve our support.
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Thousands of citizen scientists submitted over 1.2 million records of wild plants last year through projects that reach our central database of over 53 million records. Volunteer experts review each one; currently, this depends on a small network of 137 of the best botanists, covering as much territory as possible. To keep pace with growing enthusiasm and prevent data bottlenecks that could delay conservation decisions, we need to be able to verify more records, at scale and with integrity.
As the largest and most active organization dedicated to botany in Britain and Ireland, the BSBI is uniquely positioned to solve this challenge. To get data contributing to conservation action, we need to scale our existing pathways of training, skill development and volunteering to attract, train, and retain more expert verifiers. Investment in these roles will create more high-value data and better botanists. We will also ensure our systems free verifiers to focus on the most crucial records.
