Plant Atlas 2020 launch plans, upcoming conferences, contents of British & Irish Botany 4.2, panel of VCRs, member notices

NOTICE OF 2022 BSBI ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

Inside this issue of BSBI News you should find a hard copy invitation to attend the 2022 BSBI Annual General Meeting (AGM). It will be held at 7.15pm on Thursday 17 November 2022.

The AGM will be preceded by talks from 6.30 pm. It will be held electronically. The Board of Trustees approved holding the AGM electronically given this allows more members to participate, cuts down travel costs including carbon emissions and responds to those members who have asked for an electronic meeting. It also removes any uncertainty around Covid measures if they are required.

There will be one link to join the meeting which will be made available after registering to attend. Details will be posted on the BSBI website: www. bsbi.org/annual-general-meeting. You may join the meeting when you wish, but only BSBI members are eligible to vote in the AGM.

Any member interested in becoming a trustee may find more information on the BSBI website (and see the note on trustee vacancies below).

BSBI Company Secretary

At the BSBI AGM on 17 November, members will be asked to vote on a proposal to increase the annual membership subscription rates as of 1 January 2023. The decision to propose this increase has not been taken lightly. Full details of the proposed increased rates, and the reasons underlying this proposal, can be found on this page: www.bsbi.org/membership-subscriptions-2023 which also includes information about the BSBI Hardship Fund to which members can apply if they find themselves in unforeseen financial difficulty.

MEMBERS IN IRELAND

A reminder to Irish members; please let me have your Eircode if you have not done so already. If you don’t know it, visit https://finder.eircode.ie/#/ to find out. Also please let me know if you have had problems receiving postal mailings from BSBI because of the new customs requirements.

Membership Secretary gwynn.ellis@bsbi.org

PAPERLESS MEMBERSHIP

Areminder that it is now possible to opt to receive all BSBI publications in digital format rather than by post. If any member would like to update their preferences, please email membership@bsbi.org.

Fundraising Manager

STAFF CHANGES AND RECRUITMENT

Jim McIntosh, BSBI Scottish Officer and Senior Country Officer is planning to retire in November 2022. Jim has made a huge contribution to BSBI’s work over 18 years and will be much missed. He has decided to retire in November so he can say his goodbyes at the Scottish Botanists’ Conference, and also to give time for a good handover. We are delighted that Jim will continue to be closely involved with BSBI as he will remain our Vice-county Recorder for Mid-Perthshire.

BSBI has been undertaking a staff review to ensure we have the right roles and capacity in place to deliver our strategic plan. As part of this, we are now recruiting both a Scotland Officer and a Countries Support Manager (a one-year post to take us through the completion and launch of the Atlas and development of our new science strategy).

Trustees have also agreed to invest in a new Data Support Officer role for two years, to work alongside our Database Officer, providing extra capacity to improve our user support, and training and documentation for the Distribution Database (DDb).

BSBI Chief Executive

TRUSTEE VACANCIES

We are looking for up to four trustees to join BSBI’s Board for a period of three years (with an option of a further three years afterwards). Any member can apply to become a trustee and you can find more information here: www.bsbi.org/ bsbi-trustees. A wide range of perspectives and experience is valuable on the Board and support is available, including training opportunities, mentoring and paying expenses. The time commitment is attending, and reading papers for, four board meetings a year, each of which lasts around three hours. Two are online and two in person (in London, but also with hybrid facilities).

The Board is responsible for ensuring that we carry out our charitable objectives in accordance with the relevant legislation. It sets the Society’s overall vision, mission, policy and goals, in line with our Strategic Plan, and must also ensure our financial stability and the effective management of our assets. This year, to ensure we have the right skills mix for effective governance, we are particularly looking for trustees with knowledge or experience in finance, science, fundraising/marketing and digital/IT. We would ideally like at least one new trustee to be resident in Ireland (either the Republic or Northern Ireland).

Nominations, accompanied by the consent of the proposed candidate and the name of a seconder, should be emailed to the Company Secretary (steve. gater@bsbi.org) or sent by post, to arrive by midday Thursday 6 October 2022. Details of nominations will be published by 13 October here: www.bsbi.org/ annual-general-meeting.

If you are interested in becoming a trustee now or in future, we would also be delighted to discuss the trustee role with you, so do get in touch.

*BSBI Chair

BSBI FORUM

In 2020, as part of our Resilience Project, the Society’s committee structure was changed, to help ensure we have strong, clear, accountable governance and decision-making structures. At the same time the trustees committed to hold an annual planning meeting across BSBI to promote joined up communication and planning across the Society. In March 2022 we held our first BSBI Forum, and 47 committee members, trustees and staff took part in online discussion sessions to: (1) celebrate what’s good – showcasing what we’ve done for botanists, wild plants and botany over the previous year; (2) discuss the future – an open space for free flow of ideas and (3) explore what this means in terms of actions for the next year.

Themes that emerged from the Forum discussions were: • The need to continue to improve communications including through continued cross-fertilisation approaches across our committees and by signposting a clear route for members to send feedback, ideas and questions – now available on the members area of the website. • The need for training and skills including learning from the success of the Aquatic Plant Project in

Ireland and a new idea of developing botanical mentoring. • The importance of using our data to influence conservation, as showcased through the botanical heatmap partnership with Natural England (see last issue). • The need to support and recognise the vital work of BSBI volunteers, with ideas of expanding BSBI awards (see notice below) and taking a team approach to the VCR role. • The need to engage more people in botany through local and urban projects and learning from the ‘loose networks’ approach pioneered in

Scotland. • BSBI joining the new European Botanical

Federation, so we can collaborate with other societies across Europe.

We also considered diversity and inclusion at BSBI and how this can help contribute towards our vision of more people caring about plants, as well offering opportunities to improve our learning and decisionmaking. We discussed steps we can take to continue our diversity and inclusion journey at BSBI, including continuing to offer a range of activities catering for all ability levels; growing our ‘Botany for All’ plans; equipping members to be ambassadors for plants and advocates for botany; continuing to share exciting stories about wild plants in the media and building on work we’ve done during the pandemic to make our events and activities more accessible online.

You can read the full BSBI Forum report on our password-protected Governance website (https:// governance.bsbi.org). Learning from this first Forum event will feed into our work plans and the design of future Forum meetings.

NOMINATE SOMEONE FOR A BSBI AWARD

We know that there are many people who do tremendous unpaid work for the Society and so we are launching two new Awards to recognise those who go that extra mile to inspire and encourage their fellow botanists. The Awards will be a certificate, and a listing in the April issue of BSBI News and on an awards page on our website. Nominations will be open from 1 October to 31 December. They will be considered by the Board’s Nominations, Awards and Governance Committee and announced in the April issue of BSBI News and online.

Nominations are sought from both individual members, or from individuals on behalf of local groups or committees for the following two categories: • An outstanding contribution to botany in your area (county, region or country). This might be through recording, interpretation to help inform conservation/land management decisions, mentoring, training, engagement or organisational activity. We will be looking for nominations from each country and there will be a limit on the number of awards made each year. • An outstanding contribution to British and

Irish Botany. The nominee will have made a sustained and nationally significant contribution to advancing the understanding and appreciation of the British and Irish flora through their actions and/ or publications. This award might not be made every year.

Nomination forms are available from the members-only area of the BSBI website and give more detail of what is required. Only BSBI members may make a nomination.

BSBI ATLAS LAUNCH PLANS

Plans are progressing for the launch of the latest Atlas in March 2023, with an online launch followed by a series of face-to-face events across Britain and Ireland (early ideas are for face-to-face events in Belfast, Carmarthen, Dublin, Edinburgh and Oxford). We’ll provide more detail in the next (January) issue of BSBI News.

We are delighted to announce the title of the printed atlas, Plant Atlas 2020: Mapping Changes in the Distribution of the British and Irish Flora. This two-volume book will be published by BSBI in partnership with Princeton University Press. Members will be able to pre-order copies with a 50% discount from January 2023 – look out for a flyer inside the next issue of BSBI News. We will also be launching the first online Plant Atlas, a website with all the Atlas species data displayed in interactive maps, developed in partnership with UKCEH. This is all very exciting and we hope that the thousands of you who went out recording and contributed your data will enjoy seeing the outputs from all your hard work.

For now, work is ongoing to draw out the various trends underlying changes in plant distributions but we’re already thinking about how we might communicate to journalists and policy-makers the various ‘stories’ that the Atlas will tell – and we’d like your help with this.

Do you have anecdotes or images that would illustrate how your local flora has changed during your lifetime? Maybe you recorded for one of the previous atlases and have photographs of how a site near you has changed over the years? Maybe you’d like to tell us about the plants that disappeared from your area, due to habitat loss or agricultural intensification, or maybe you recorded plants for this third atlas that moved into your vice-county recently, perhaps in response to climate change? We’d be interested in positive stories and images (about restoration of once-degraded meadows, or flourishing road verges) as well as negative stories about declines and losses.

Plant Atlas 2020 will provide a wealth of evidence around how our plants are changing, but for that extra ‘human touch’, please email Louise with your stories and images.

*BSBI Communications Officer

CONGRATULATIONS!

Sandy Knapp, Merit Researcher at the Natural History Museum and a BSBI trustee, has just been made a Fellow of the Royal Society. We’d like to extend our congratulations to Sandy on this prestigious award which is only granted to individuals who the Society considers have made a ‘substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge’ – previous recipients include Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Sir David Attenborough.

PRESIDENTS’ AWARD WINNER

This year's Presidents' Award has gone to John Richards for his Field Handbook to British and Irish Dandelions, number 23 in the series of BSBI Handbooks. This award is made jointly each year by the Presidents of the BSBI and the Wild Flower Society to acknowledge the year's most useful contribution to the understanding of the flowering plants and ferns of Britain and Ireland. Find out about past recipients here: www.bsbi.org/presidentsprize.

SCOTTISH BOTANISTS’ CONFERENCE 2022

This year’s Scottish Botanists’ Conference will be held face-to-face at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh on Saturday 5 November. Our main speaker, Clifton Bain will give a talk entitled Rainforests and Peatlands: Travels around Scotland’s most threatened habitats. Following on from last year’s very successful theme of National Nature Reserves, Shaila Rao, will give a talk on the Conservation of Mar Lodge Estate NNR.

There will be an interesting variety of other short talks, workshops, exhibits and posters, the Scottish AGM and the Photographic Competition. For fuller details see the flyer inside this issue of BSBI News. You’ll need to register for the event and you can do this, and book exhibitor space, via the BSBI website: www.bsbi.org/scottish-annual-meeting.

Although we are not planning to livestream the event, we may try to record the talks so they can be viewed or re-viewed afterwards – if successful. We are going to have to limit numbers, so if you have missed being able to meet up with friends and fellow botanists over the past two years, book early!

BSBI Scotland Officer

BRITISH AND IRISH BOTANICAL CONFERENCE 2022: ‘A FESTIVAL OF PLANTS’

We are delighted to invite you to our faceto-face conference at the Natural History Museum, London, on 19 November 2022. The event formerly known as the BSBI Exhibition Meeting is back and we have some exciting talks lined up for you. Find out more in the flyer (inside this issue of BSBI News) which sets out the draft programme for the day and explains how to book, whether you wish to exhibit, join a herbarium tour, or simply to come along and enjoy the day’s proceedings.

We hope to be able to record at least some of the talks and upload them afterwards to the BSBI YouTube channel, but for many of us the main draw will be a chance to meet up again in person after the last two years of Zoom meetings. Please book as soon as you can – we will be monitoring the Covid-19 situation during the autumn and if the advice is to return to social distancing, we may have no option but to restrict attendance to the first 100 people who book. We’ll keep you updated via the BSBI website.

NEW YEAR PLANT HUNT

BSBI’s twelfth New Year Plant Hunt will run from Saturday 31 December 2022 to Tuesday 3 January 2023. Last year’s Hunt, held under Covid restrictions, saw 1,895 people taking part and they generated 20,612 records of 669 taxa in bloom. We’re hoping that this winter we will be allowed to go out plant-hunting in groups, as we used to before the pandemic – for many of us, this is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the Hunt.

Keep an eye on our website for further information nearer the time: www.bsbi.org/new-year-plant-hunt.

PANEL OF VCRS

In Shropshire (v.c. 40), Sarah Whild and Alex Lockton have retired after 24 years and 7 years respectively as VCRs. Both will be well known to BSBI members, perhaps most notably for their 2015 publication The Flora and Vegetation of Shropshire, though really that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the contributions both have made to the BSBI, and to conservation in general. Many thanks to Sarah and Alex, and also to Mags Cousins (mags@bagbatch. co.uk) and John Martin, who are the new joint VCRs for the county. Bob Kirby has been appointed joint VCR for North Devon (v.c. 4), alongside Bob Hodgson, and in West Gloucestershire, Olga Krylova (olgakvc34bsbi@gmail.com) and Rupert Higgins are new in post following the death of Clive Lovatt earlier this year. In Staffordshire, I’m sad to relay the news that Ian Hopkins, joint VCR since 2014, has died. John Hawksford writes that ‘no one knew more about Staffordshire plants than Ian’, ‘and he will be keenly missed’. And in Angus, Mark Tulley, jointVCR for the county, has died. Mark will be greatly missed by the Angus team, and the wider botanical community, and we send our condolences to the friends and family of Mark, Ian and Clive.

In Ireland, Co. Waterford (v.c. H6) has three new joint VCRs; Ann Trimble, Andrew Malcolm and Julie Larkin. Eamon Gaughan, already joint VCR for Leitrim (v.c. H29), has taken on the role of VCR for Sligo (v.c. H28) too. In Limerick (v.c. H8), we are looking for a joint VCR to share the role with the recently appointed Tanya Slattery. Vacancies

In England, there are vacancies for Buckinghamshire, Dorset (alongside Robin Walls), Essex (North and South), Surrey and East & West Sussex. In Scotland, there are vacancies in Argyll (alongside Gordon Rothero), Banffshire and Midlothian. And in Ireland, there are vacancies for Cavan, and Limerick (alongside Tanya Slattery). If you, or someone you know, is interested in taking up the role of VCR (or perhaps first trying it out as a trainee VCR), and would like to discuss what is involved, then please do get in touch with me, or the relevant Country Officer, using the contact details given on the inside front cover.

Scientific and England Officer

PANEL OF REFEREES AND SPECIALISTS: UPDATES AND AMENDMENTS

Responsibilities

Quercus and Crataegus: McKean, Mr D.R. is no longer a referee. Crataegus is now vacant. Limonium: now vacant.

Orobanche, Phelipanche: Rumsey, Dr F.J. is now sole referee.

Oenanthe: now vacant.

Carex muricata group and Carex hybrids: Porter, Mr M.S. is now sole referee.

Contact details

Updates/changes to emails are as follows: Dalrymple, Dr S.E. – s.e.dalrymple@ljmu.ac.uk. Kay, Mr G.M. – graeme.m.kay@gmail.com. Parker, Prof. J.S. – jsp1796@gmail.com. Rumsey, Dr F.J. – rumsey2021@outlook.com. Walls, Mr R.M. – robin44walls@outlook.com.

Sending plant material to and from the EU

Several people are reporting difficulties, delays and non-delivery when sending plant specimens between the UK and EU countries. In theory you should not need a phytosanitary licence for most material, although it seems to me that the situation is hazy when it comes to specimens with seeds. Section 5 at the website www.herbariumcurators. org/curators-toolbox has some useful practical tips for preparation and packaging. Anyone intending to send material to a referee in the EU would do well to contact the recipient in advance to find out if they have previous experience of successfully receiving material from post-Brexit UK. You may also find it helpful to email the UK Animal Plant Health Agency at planthealth.info@apha.gov.uk to determine whether material needs to be submitted via an established inspection post, and any charges that will then apply to you as a private citizen.

Panel of Referees & Specialists

CORRECTION

There was an error in David Blower’s article on Centranthus ruber in the last issue of BSBI News (No. 150, April 2022). On p. 60. in Equation 1 (Apparent Change) the numerator and denominator in the fraction should be swapped.

MEMBER NOTICES

John Gough (1757–1825) and his missing herbarium – can you help?

John Gough of Kendal was a natural philosopher and polymath who lost his sight in early childhood following an attack of smallpox. In his autobiography (The Dark Path to Knowledge, edited by Michael Pearson and Ian Hodkinson, published 2001) he described how, with the help of his school friends, he became a proficient botanist and amassed an extensive herbarium of plants collected in his native Cumbria. This collection remained in the family along with his library until they were sold at auction in London in July 1909. In the catalogue, Lot 337 was described as ‘a collection of several hundred flowers, grasses, ferns … laid on white paper, loosely inserted in 8 folio albums, half calf, with book plates of Harry Arnold of Arnbarrow.’ The herbarium was sold for 17 shillings but there is no record of the buyer’s name. It is not recorded in any public collection and its current whereabouts remain unknown. Any further information about the present location of the herbarium would be much appreciated.

Change of email

Frank Horsman, author of Who Discovered the “Teesdale Rarities”? (see review, BSBI News 148, September 2021) has changed his email address to frankhorsman306@gmail.com. For anyone interested, the book is still available.

BRITISH & IRISH BOTANY 4:2

The second issue of the 2022 volume of British & Irish Botany, BSBI’s open access, online scientific journal, was published in June (see box for Table of Contents). You can view or download the papers free of charge, as well as previous issues and guidelines for submissions, from the B&IB website: https://britishandirishbotany.org/index.php/bib. You can also phone us on 07725 862957 to discuss a proposal.

Prof Ian Denholm, who has been Editor-in-Chief of British & Irish Botany since it was launched in 2019, is now looking to hand over the reins. If you feel that you might have the skills, time and interest to take over this voluntary role, please contact us at bib@bsbi.org for an informal chat. An academic background and/or experience of journal publication would be desirable but not essential, and editorial assistance is on hand to support the Editor-inChief with admin, journal promotion and use of the publication software (OJS Open Access).

Identification and taxonomy of Betula (Betulaceae) in Great Britain and Ireland – Andy Amphlett Populations sizes and leaf morphology of the Welsh endemics Sorbus cambrensis Welsh Whitebeam and Sorbus stenophylla Llanthony Whitebeam (Rosaceae) – Martin Lepší, Timothy C.G. Rich Conspectus of and key to the world’s species of Vulpia C.C. Gmel. (Poaceae: Loliinae) and seven related genera – Clive A. Stace Growth trajectories of diploid and tetraploid trees of the Betula pendula/B. pubescens complex (Betulaceae): a 38-year record of trunk circumference – Anthony J. Davy, John A. Gill Long-term study of the Sword-leaved Helleborine Cephalanthera longifolia (Orchidaceae) in Knapdale, Argyll – Patricia Batty Changing environment and orchid distributions close to their northern and southern limits in Britain – David Trudgill Notes on Atriplex (Amaranthaceae) species and hybrids, particularly A. littoralis and the hybrid A. littoralis × A. prostrata (A. × hulmeana) – Michael Wilcox

The Genus Hieracium (Asteraceae) in the British Isles in 1821 – J. Bevan Rubus sellii, a new name for R. rubicundiflorus (Rosaceae) – Muhammad Idrees, Julian M.H. Shaw The typification of the Linnaean name Papaver medium (Papaveraceae) published in Flora Anglica – Duilio Iamonico